Semi Automatic Linking

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

Grabs the JSON from my pinboard links. (Could be a particular tag) ³
Loops through the ones for the last few days.
Creates an html list, each item consisting of the tile, linked to the original and the description.
In the description it block quotes any line starting with >
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.

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. ↩
I actually think this was long enough ago to have been with delicious!↩
JSON Helper is great makes it easy to handle json in AppleScript ↩