Tag: applescript

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Commentcompare

There has been a fair bit of comment recently on how twitter is taking over from blogging and commenting on blogs. My own blog has never had a high number of comments, but the number has dropped. Recently I’ve noticed that posts are tweeted and retweeted, but not commented on.

Every so often I try to up my own commenting, without posting ‘me too’ or suchlike and to keep track of the comments I make. In the past I’ve used coComment, but found it did not always work for me and sometimes reports posts have new comments when they do not. I’ve also just bookmarked the posts I comment on in my browser, but that gets a bit messy and is not portable.

So I’ve come up with the following solution, it uses AppleScript so is a mac only method, but I am sure someone could do, or has done the same sort of thing with greasemonkey for firefox.

It consists of two simple scripts, the first based on one called @review (I think) that I downloaded a few years ago and can’t find a reference to credit. This script takes the current url in Safari and posts it to delicious tagging it with @comment and making it private. The private part is to stop the links showing up in my RSS feed with my other links. The script: @comment.scpt.html is pretty simple, and uses the delicious API.

The second script just retrieves the last 10 links from my delicious tagged @comment, opens a new window in Safari and tabs for each of the links. Again a simple enough script: opencomments.scpt.html. It relies on the private RSS feed supplied by delicious, you can copy yours from the delicious page listing links:

Deliciousrsslinks

Fastscript Grab

I run both of these scripts from FastScripts. FastScripts is a replacement for the mac’s Script menu. It lists scripts, current application at the top, and allows you to add keyboard shortcuts. So my @comment script is invoked with control-alt-command-c which is easy to hit. I just post a comment and hit the key combination, growl notification is built into the script and lets me know if the submission to delicious was successful.

The scripts can be copied and pasted into the Script Editor if you want to use them, all you need to do is add your username and password to both and get the private delicious RSS feed url.

I would be interested in finding other ways of keeping track of conversations, so please let me know if you have a good way.

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twitter icon

I’ve messed about with the twitter API before in a ham fisted sort of way (say ObliqueTweet, twitter presenter or Tweets @iowconference08) by basically borrowing various snippets of code, this is another such effort.

I notice an interesting post on Tom Smith’s theOTHERblog: Twitter, Growl, Boosh! In AppleScript!!. I’ve borrowed code from Tom before and was interested in this latest script. The script basically used growl to show tweets for a search or hashtag to be used when watch tv with a group spread over different locations. Tom’s script used the Vienna rss reader as a intermediary for handling the RSS. I recently switched from Vienna to NetNewsWire and didn’t have Vienna installed so took a slightly different approach.

I remembered that someone had mentioned that AppleScript handles xml now (via the ‘System Events’ application) and this seemed like an opportunity to mess about with that and growl.

Growltweets

I’ve cobbled together an applescript that runs and every minute, downloads the latest from a twitter search and growls them. The script is pretty rough at the moment (and in all likelihood will stay that way) but I’ve posted it for view and will upload the actual script once it looks a wee bit better.

The script might be of use in the same way Tom’s is, to display tweets over a shared experience. Or perhaps so make sure I don’t miss an @johnjohnston tweet but don’t get caught up in twitter while I am ‘working’ but really it served to give me a bit more practice with the twitter search API and in starting to learn to parse xml with AppleScript. As twitter become bigger by the second and its API continues to grow I hope one day I’ll do something useful.

twitter image Mirjami Manninen from smashingmagazine

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I’ve been reading a pile of stuff about twitter over the last few months. Quite a few edubloggers around the globe have taken up tweeting in a big way. I originally thought that it would be more use to conference goers than class teachers and didn’t pay much attention.
Yesterday I saw that a facebook friend was wondering how to update his status on facebook and on twitter at the same time.
This remined me that both twitter and facebook have APIs. A bit of googling took me to ”More status updating goodness‘ where Sören provides an applescript for quicksilver to update several status messages at once, including twitter and facebook. I took the script and simplified it a bit, got rid of the quicksilver stuff other services and I am afraid removed the keychain scripting for the faster hard coded username and password.

So I am thinking of what good scripting these services would do. I guess you could combine the script to tell other twitters what you are playing in itunes, what you are reading in safari, or some other information grabbed by AppleScript either locally or via a webservice. You could run thse in an idle loop so that someone could twitter the current webpage they are reading, application they are using etc. Would this be useful? Eventually a scriptable phone could twitter its geolocation…

teachmeet07

Now I am on twitter I’d appreciate some contacts, my username is johnjohnston.
It is not all that likely I’ll be doing much tweeting for now. I do look forward to seeing it it is a useful tool at the Scottish learning festival and TeachMeet07.

Speaking of which the planning for TeachMeet07 is well under way. Check the wiki or follow everything Tagged: Teachmeet07. It looks like being a great event.