Delicious Bookmarks and OpenMeta Tags

There are quite a few things I love when it comes to my Mac. I love Spotlight. I love OpenMeta tagging. I love Evernote. I love being able to collect information from any source, and find anything I’ve saved, anywhere, no matter what program I used to create it. I especially love programs that allow me to accomplish that. applescript, bookmarking, delicious, experiments, macos, openmeta, tagging, utility

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A Few Scripts for TaskPaper Users

I’ve been using Things for task management lately, mostly because it has a decent iPad app. I really do love my iPad… however, I often use TaskPaper from Hog Bay Software for weekend to-do lists and for tracking bugs and fixes on my various freetime projects. I sometimes edit my TaskPaper files (which are just plain text) in TextMate and use some Ruby scripts adapted from the GTDAlt bundle to do some fun things, but I really like the interface you get when you actually use… applescript, gtd, macos, taskpaper, utility

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TextExpander Experiments

I’ve seen a few people around the ‘net sharing their TextExpander snippets, so I thought I’d join in. Not familiar with TextExpander? It’s a Mac utility that expands short snippets into full text you’ve defined. There are quite a few programs that do text expansion (see Typinator), but TextExpander currently holds my heart because of its extra features such as shell scripting, completion suggestion and a new Fill dialog for variable input. css, email, experiments, html, lipsum, macos, markdown, ruby, scripting, service, snippet, snow leopard, textexpander, utility

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A System Service for to. Url Shortening

I’m fascinated by http://to. It’s a url shortener with no TLD. Some browsers, and apparently some DNS setups, don’t like the urls it creates (they want a .com or .org or anything at the end), so it’s not exactly in heavy usage. Still, I wish they had an API. In lieu of that, here’s a quick Ruby script that will run on a stock OS X install as a System Service. It’s so simple that I’m not even going to package it up… It’ll be a good chance to… service, shell, snow leopard, url shortener, utility

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A Big Upgrade for Instapaper Beyond

I just got back from a week-long “Code Jam” that was all business, all week, so I took a Saturday to work on some personal projects. Instapaper beyond 1.1 is out, and I’d love to hear some feedback on the new features. One of the major additions is a bit of mouse support. You can now click an article in your list to skip the highlighting to that point, and then perform the standard commands on it (open, move, archive, etc.). To that end, most of the links in the interface have also been… fluid, instapaper, instapaper beyond, userscript

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Compress PDFs With Preview

It’s probably old news to most, but I just realized this today. Since Leopard, OS X’s multi-talented Preview.app can compress needlessly large PDF’s in a matter of seconds. My clients (and today, my mother) often export PDF’s from various programs that don’t flatten or compress images, ending up with files between 8M and 90M, in my experience. Obviously, when you’re building a website, you want to get filesize down as much as possible. I’ve always used… compression, leopard, pdf, quicktip, snow leopard

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Adding a TinyMCE Button to Wordpress

I was working on a quick website for my wife, and trying to make things as simple as possible for both of us. For me, I just wanted to give her a flexible template that I didn’t have to hack much on (I went with Thesis), and for her, I wanted her to be able to start posting with a minimal learning curve. She just got a Flip, and wanted to start posting video. Since she was already posting to YouTube, I just wrote a quick shortcode in Thesis’ custom functions file that would take a… TinyMCE, Wordpress, functions.php

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Instapaper Beyond for Fluid.app

Introducing Instapaper Beyond, an Instapaper userscript for Fluid that provides full keyboard navigation and some special features for browsing your Instapaper articles. If you’re not familiar, Fluid is a Mac (only) application which creates a Single Site Browser (SSB) for a site, using the same Webkit engine as Safari. It essentially allows you to turn web applications and sites into Mac apps. It’s pure Cocoa, so all of your Services and fun text tricks (like Control-T… fluid, instapaper, instapaper beyond, keyboard, navigation, userscript

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Updated: Songza Lucky Link Service

Songza.fm has moved to Songza.org, so I’ve rewritten the old Songza Lucky Link Service for Snow Leopard to match. This new version of the service runs without dependencies, so it should work for any Snow Leopard setup right out of the box. It’s a bit silly, but what it does is take your selected text and run it as a query on Songza.org, parse for the first result (if there are any), shorten that link and insert it after your selected text. A fast, easy way to punctuate your obscure… ruby, service, snow leopard, songza

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Songza Is Back!

Just a quick note for those who may have missed it: Songza is back at http://songza.org! This is exciting to me personally, as I had been having a lot of fun searching and automatically creating links to Songza pages, mostly just to back up obscure music references when I pushed them on unsuspecting victims. Hooray! songza

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Save Safari Tabs to Instapaper

I posted a way to save your Safari tabs to Evernote, which I’ve found is generally a great way to save bookmarks. It syncs automatically to your other computers and your iPhone, and it’s fast and easy. If you really want to highlight a few tabs to make sure you get back to them, you might consider this script, though. Once you’ve saved your entire Safari browsing session for later, close everything except for those special urls, run the code below as a script, and your open… applescript, instapaper, safari

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Saving Safari Browsing Sessions to Evernote

I primarily use Safari for web browsing, mostly because it’s smoother and faster than Firefox, and the Web Inspector is just as useful as Firebug. As time passes, I end up with a lot of web pages open, and I like to clear out my browser tabs on a regular basis. Safari doesn’t really have a long-term session-saving option, so I save lists of open tabs to various applications. I used to use SafariStand to do this, but it got too buggy and slow for me. I use VoodooPad for it, but I… applescript, evernote, safari, websurfing

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