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I’ve often posted links to this blog and on occasion whole sets of links, usually from my pinboard collection. I’ve created them in various way. The idea is somewhat inspired by other blogs and the fairly recent resurgence of bloggers posting Newsletters 1.

My favourite is Tom Woodward’s Weekly Web Harvest which is an inspiration, a fascinating and wide ranging list.

Tom produces these posts automatically in WordPress grabbing the links from pinboard.

Recently Arron Davis was blogging about Scripting an Automated Solution to the same problem. I suggested throwing pinboard into his google sheet mix. This got me experimenting with google sheets and thinking about the problem.

In previous efforts I’d been wondering about separating my thoughts from quotes in pinboard descriptions 2. Thinking about this again I though the easiest way would be to use the markdown convention of putting a greater than sign > before the quoted lines.

I made a start in google sheets but hit a snag with parsing the quotes. Sheets seemed to add some extra line breaks to the RSS feed from pinboard (or pinboard has extra line breaks in RSS). Anyway I though it would be easier to handle in AppleScript.

The script I’ve come up with does the following

  1. Grabs the JSON from my pinboard links. (Could be a particular tag) 3
  2. Loops through the ones for the last few days.
  3. Creates an html list, each item consisting of the tile, linked to the original and the description.
  4. In the description it block quotes any line starting with >
  5. Opens BBEdit with the list ready for editing and posting (you could easily swap editors).

It would be easy to automatically post to the blog with AppleScript, but I want to be able to edit, fix typos and think a bit.

I’ve posted the script.

You can see the first post created on this blog: Life in Links 20-10-2017

I am not sure if this would help Aaron. I don’t even know if he has a mac. But I had fun playing with this. AppleScript does not seem to be used by many(any) people I meet but I find it really useful.

Featured image: Image from page 237 of “Mechanical appliances, mechanical … | Flickr No known copyright restrictions., I changed the colour a wee bit.

  1. I don’t really like getting these in my mail, too easy to ignore, but you can often ferret out aa RSS feed. An exception is the marvellous Katexic Clippings which I read straightaway. ↩
  2. I actually think this was long enough ago to have been with delicious!↩
  3. JSON Helper is great makes it easy to handle json in AppleScript ↩
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Liked IndieWeb: The Book (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)
For a quite a while I’ve been thinking about writing a book about the IndieWeb to provide a broader overview of what it is philosophically, how it works, how its community functions, and most specifically how the average person can more easily become a part of it.

This should be very useful. I’ve been trying various indieweb things for a while, but still find it tricky to understand and implement some of the technologies. There is a great wiki, but I think I am more likely to read through a book.

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Some things that have caught my interest over the last week:

  • Good Teachers Talk: Better Teachers Listen | Class Teaching The post is more interesting, to me, than the title.

    One way of achieving this identify shift is to come unprepared to a lesson! For example, working on a poem in English that neither the pupils nor the teacher have read before. In doing so, pupils begin to see that their identities can fluctuate from learner to contributor, thus giving them the confidence to enact this discourse themselves in the classroom and beyond.

    Which speaks to vocalising your process. I do that (I hope) in writing, but not so much in reading.

  • School walls are oozing with unhelpful growth mindset cheese…. | teacherhead

    Get these slogans blown up and laminated and plaster your corridors and walls in them… Bingo! Go Growth Mindset

    And

    Live it. Don’t laminate it. Stick that on a poster

    .

  • Developing a Proper Growth Mindset – The Educator Blog

    False Growth Mindset

    After the recent pushback on Growth Mindset this post suggests that there can be real Growth Mindset and “Many of the best teachers are already there”

  • Online training – Raspberry Pi We recently launched a new way for people to learn about computing with the Raspberry Pi Foundation: free online training courses, available to anyone, anywhere in the world!
  • How to Live Without Google Google trackers have been found on 75% of the top million websites. This means they are not only tracking what you search for, they’re also tracking which websites you visit, and using all your data for ads that follow you around the internet.
  • Physical Computing With Scratch | Raspberry Pi Projects

    The version of Scratch included with the Raspberry Pi has a number of unique features; one of the most useful is its ability to communicate with the GPIO pins (General Purpose Input Output). These pins allow you to connect your Raspberry Pi to a range of devices, from lights and motors to buttons and sensors. The original Raspberry Pi had a 26-pin header and newer models (B+, Pi 2, Pi 3, etc) have a 40-pin header, but this workshop will work with any model.

    I’ve generally failed with any raspberry pi stuff that involves extra hardware beyond a camera this might help.

  • Simple Scratch intruder alarm « Blog My Wiki!

    uses any old Raspberry Pi with Raspbian and some parts you’d find in a CamJam EduKit or similar: an LED, a resistor, a push-button switch, a buzzer and a Passive Infra Red (PIR) movement sensor wired up

    Looks like it might be a nice we project for school.

  • Fragmentum – A microcast from Adam Procter A new microcast. Glad to see a education one appearing.
  • Clips – Google Drive lesson plan to use clips to produced short, 30 sec, movie about a country.
  • Spreadsheets – Google Drive Resources for teaching spreadsheets. Year 5 (England)
  • iOS Keynote is so darn cool! – Learners Together: Teaching with Technology Animated presentations for six word stories.

 
Featured image: Got Links? | On some large road machine from Gila County AZ | Alan Levine | Flickr CC-BY