I’m a huge fan of Pinboard.in for online bookmarking. Maciej is an awesome developer, has a strong business model1 (so he has no reason to sell your data), and delivered an open API. You can link your account to Twitter2, Instapaper, and Pocket; and also set your account to be completely private.3 There’s even the fun story of the Great Delicious Exodus of 2010. It also provides an easy way to start link blogging on Micro.blog via its RSS Feeds. If you want to send everything (I don’t recommend this) and have a public account, it’s as easy as adding https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:username/4 to your feeds in the same manner as WordPress. I’d recommend choosing a tag, like to_blog,5 and creating a feed just for that: https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/t:to_blog. If you want to have more options, you can use up to three tags: http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:username/t:tag1/t:tag2/t:tag3/. Warning: I do not recommend using private feeds. @smokey let me know that future Micro.blog features may reveal them. If you’ve set up your account to be private, creating the feed is slightly more complicated. You have to add your authentication token6 to the address: https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/secret:xxxx/u:username. I would definitely use https here and if someone gets a hold of your…
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Was troubleshooting MarsEdit 4’s download preview template function today. It hadn’t been working, but @danielpunkass pointed me to a potential solution. I changed the “Home Page URL” to the https version and voilà, my beautiful blog now previews.
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Maybe I’ll use the status format to remove the post titles from the home page, but keep them on the individual page? Decisions, decisions… Also, @danielpunkass, setting the format is a feature of MarsEdit 4, not 3, right?
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Just added Post Formats to my child theme. Maybe Clean Retina predates them? Or perhaps they reserve it for the pro version? In any case, I’m not using them for anything at the moment, but perhaps it will be useful for the future.
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Looks like I got SSL up and running on both this blog and my professional site. It’s really gotten quite easy. Thanks to DreamHost, Let’s Encrypt, Really Simple SSL, and Squarespace.
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WordPress and DreamHost are being funky. Took way too long to write that last post.
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Just wrote my first substantial blog post in years. Crazy town.
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So, to recap one final time, I've cobbled together an AppleScript that copies blogging related links from my Privacy Locked personal Pinboard to the ReadingGeorgeFox account. While I'm not yet back in NYC—now it's Jersey rather than Upstate—I've found a printer and the the time to annotate the script. Some credit: I used Rafael Bugajewski's DEVONthink Pro Pinboard Importer as a starting point; I have modified it a fair amount, though. Anyways, here goes nothing: 1 Lines 9 thru 11 download the bookmarks via simple curl2 commands. When I began working on the script, I was still confused about the url syntax for tags, so I set up three separate downloads. This ended up making some later processing simpler, and, as the downloads were so small,3 I decided to keep it this way. As for downloading to files instead of passing the data directly to the rest of the script, it was easier to troubleshoot and AppleScript seems to be happier pulling data from a file on disk. Lastly, I'm using Pinboard API tokens instead of passwords. While I could have used Keychain scripting to be extra secure, these scripts are run locally on my machine and I figured the…
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As I mentioned in my last post, I've enabled Privacy Lock on my personal Pinboard account and written an AppleScript to sync blogging source links to the ReadingGeorgeFox account. The script is available for download.1 I'm still upstate so we'll have to wait until Monday for a full account and description. I've commented the script pretty thoroughly if you'd like to use it in the meantime. No promises or warranties attached to it, of course. ↩
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Process Now that I have a week of regular posting under my belt, I figured I’d record what my process is now and what I hope it to be going forward[1]. Right now, I’m rolling it old school—first draft is handwritten using pen and paper[2]. For all the Hoopla over technological methods to force you to focus on writing[3], nothing beats the simplicity of pen and paper. You have to switch to another device entirely to multitask. Moreover, it really does force you to slow down; I can type roughly twice as fast as I can write. Lastly, our consciousness and intelligence is distributed throughout our body[4]: our brains actually work differently using pen and paper than it does with keys and screen. Next step is typing the post into Drafts—a step up in complexity, but still using a single focus device. I revise as I go, also expanding sections left rough in the first draft. Relatively simple links, mostly those already in Pinboard and Pinbook, are also added. Onwards to the truck of computing; Drafts sends the draft post to Dropbox and MultiMarkdown Composer prints it out[5] [6]. I give it a good read aloud, then head back to…
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