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So I’ve been playing with AppleScript and blogging today.

After reading Lazy Mac OS X: Weblog links sidebar and http://www.livejournal.com/doc/server/ljp.csp.blogger.html

The Blogger API does not support the use of post titles (subjects). To set a title for your post include the title wrapped in <title> tags in your post body.

I can post to this pivot blog and a wordpress one: My Vienna Links via appleScript.

AppleScript can collect various information to post (eg the Vienna Links, latest iTunes or anything else AppleScript can get.)

Not much use in school as we don’t have macs on the network, but if I was in a school with macs I’d really be investigating this, it would be fairy simple to make a SuperCard project to collect info and post to a blog, or just make a very simple interface for children to blog with.

I am pointing the the MetaWeblogAPI Service in both pivot and wordpress but using the Blogger API, which seems simpler than the MetaWeblogAPI, but I guess if you were serious about this you would use the metaWeblog API or the Movable Type API

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I’ve been hampered from keeping up with news by a really terrible adsl problem at home, my connection to the net has been down for hours at a time every day this week, often in the early evening when I do most browsing.

Will limited time I’ve been mostly Flagging interesting stuff in Vienna, then to avoid actually reading and thinking about this I wrote a wee appleScript to produce a set of links from the posts in Vienna’s currently selected folder. you can’t set the folder via appleScript so I need to select the Marked Articles folder manually and then run the script, this is the result today this:

Becomes this:

Daily Update — January 4, 2006 Wednesday, January 4, 2006 13:34:14

Ewan @ Jordanhill Saturday, January 14, 2006 14:36:55

A good blogging day! Friday, January 6, 2006 00:59:51

The quest continues Wednesday, January 4, 2006 21:17:26

Education Session at PodcasterCon Tuesday, January 3, 2006 11:32:59

easy wikis for educators – pbwiki Friday, December 2, 2005 20:26:04

Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn?t Live Without Friday, December 30, 2005 08:48:40

A Fantastic Conference Saturday, January 14, 2006 14:30:55

Online Games in Education — This Year Could be the Big One Tuesday, January 3, 2006 17:02:33

2006 Online Edublogger Conference: Learning Is Conversation Thursday, January 12, 2006 22:05:41

Jordanhill University of Strathclyde Gig Friday, January 13, 2006 14:00:10

AbiWord Tuesday, October 11, 2005 04:12:15

Hillary Meeler featured in Education World! Wednesday, January 4, 2006 22:39:43

Some great posts in there, locally David and Ewan have been increasing the numbr of Scots Education bloggers, in some cases by offering a mars bar.

If you use vienna you might find a use for this applescript: (or be able to improve it, I would like it sorted by date)

tell application "Vienna"
	set quote to ASCII character 34
	set theLinks to ""
	set theFolder to the current folder
	set max to count of articles of theFolder
	repeat with i from max to 0 by -1
		set theLinks to theLinks & return & "<a href=" & quote & the link of article i of theFolder & quote & ">" & the title of article i of theFolder & "</a> " & the date of article i of theFolder
		
	end repeat
end tell
tell application "Tex-Edit Plus"
	make new document
	set the contents of window 1 to theLinks
	activate
end tell

Or you might be able to improve it, as my appleScript is very much self taught, I would be nice to post it automatically to the blog rather than open in Tex-edit plus first, although it could go straight to the clipboard.

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When I am not eating, drinking, visiting updating webpages or walking along the canal in the mirk, I have be mostly browsing and avoiding writing 7 things(I’ll try this soon David).

Interesting stuff I’ve found:

retrievr – search by sketch via Tim Lauer

Weblogg-ed Tech Tools For Learning links to a nice pdf.

Tools for the TEKS: podcasting intro

another podcasting intro

A ton of posts at: 2 Cents Worth almost made me comment, but I am too far into the holidays to think that much.

And I have managed to switch my browser habit to a Vienna one for reading blogs.

All this means I am avoiding a wee bit of assessment I have to do before Monday.

Found a few Sandaig mentions too:

Sandaig got a mention in the “Podcasts for Educators” Weblog Highlights from 2005 where they play a snippet from our podcast along with some other school podcasts.

Anne Davis: What’s going on inside your head? says I seem to be spending a lot of time in Scotland lately. Really good things are happening there. which should be encouraging for us scot-edu-blog folk.

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David Warlick’s Year End Reflections list the milestones in his development: dramatic lunges upward, as a discover something new that so thrills my sense of the possiblities that it is like being violently lifted to a new plateau

I was delighted to see:

# 1990 – Hypertalk (another programming language and even more magic)

as one of the milestones, HyperCard has been sadly neglected by Apple. Thankfully there is still SuperCard which I use every day and blog about here. Unfortunatly I can’t use it on the School network (pc, and teachers can’t install software), but SuperCard could let children to all sorts of cool things very simply (say create web pages). teacher can make fun game (some of mine are here).

I give a lot to be able to use SC in the class with a network connection.