Not so long ago I wrote a little script that would generate an HTML playground of any MacOS app’s menu bar, primarily for the purpose of generating screenshots. It has a full automation API and you can script screenshots with fuzzy name matching, meaning menu items names and positions can change and your automated screenshots will still work. It’s a very specific use case, but I shared it because it took way too much time and I would love it if it helped even one other person.
documentation, niftymenu
I use FeedPress to handle this blog’s RSS feeds. It reads my statically-generated RSS feed and gives me subscriber stats, as well as the ability to send new posts to social media endpoints. But it lacks Mastodon integration, and I’m spending most of my time on Mastodon lately (find me at @ttscoff@nojack.easydns.ca). So I wanted my new posts on this blog to automatically post to Mastodon. The script in this post could be used with any blog that generates an RSS feed, but is mostly…
blogging, jekyll, markdown, mastodon, ruby, scripting
I’m liking outlining in Jesse Grossjean’s latest app, Bike, for my outlining needs. It’s a simple outliner that can save the content of its outlines to Bike files, OPML documents, or plain text. And its native document format is plain HTML that’s easy to work with.
markdown
Over 20 years of writing scripts and apps I’ve collected a lot of “snippets” of code that I save whenever I solve a problem and think I’ll want the solution again in the future. I like these snippets to include notes and links, and I need to be able to easily search them and grab the code when I need it without much effort. That’s why I wrote Snibbets back in 2020.
developer, markdown, nvultra, scripting, search, snibbets, snippet
Over the last couple of days I got obsessed with wrangling my code snippet collection, once again. It’s not healthy, but it is what it is. I dug back into Snibbets, a tool for managing code snippets as plain text Markdown files that I started back in 2020. I actually got it to a really good point today, but I’m realizing that it’s getting bloated enough that it needs to become a gem before I’m ready to hype it up. The current version and mostly-up-to-date documentation…
markdown, ruby, scripting
I made a little web service back in 2015 and somewhere in the following 7 years I forgot about it. I’ve been adding title-casing to various projects and plugins and keep writing new code for it… which was the whole reason I built the API to begin with.
titlecase
Thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com again this week! Read on for some tips on avoiding the burnout associated with repetitive tasks.
sponsor, textexpander
I haven’t been posting much besides sponsored posts and web excursions for a while now. I figured it was time for a checkin for the sake of those who check this blog regularly, and especially for the benefit of those who offer financial support to me and all my projects.
blogging, mentalhealth, sleep, support
Thanks to MacUpdater for sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week! I’m a dedicated user and swear by this app for keeping my system updated. The latest version just makes everything even easier.
sponsor
Back in 2019 I wrote a little script that would parse your Applications folder and tell you which of your apps were available on Setapp. The goal was to help you figure out which apps you were already using that were also on Setapp, so you could use the Setapp version and direct a little of your subscription fee to your favorite developers.
ruby, scripting, setapp
