Another year draws to a close and it has been a bit quieter for me than in previous months. As I noted last month, I have some personal things I’m dealing with of late that have required my attention. As a result, December has been limited in terms of my time to create things. I did manage to fit in a few coffee shop trips while staying at my in-laws between Christmas and New Year, so I did manage to put out a few blog posts at least. As a result, this round up is probably going to be quite a relatively quick one.
ThoughtAsylum
The first couple of posts that I put out in December were related to getting information into Obsidian. The first of the posts covered a couple of options (URL scheme-based and file-based) using Apple Shortcuts. I then followed up with a similar post, but this time focused on the same approaches, but utilising Drafts (Drafts could of course utilise Shortcuts to do this, but this would slow things down - which isn’t what you want for capture).
The third post I managed to publish was about both Apple Shortcuts and Drafts. The standard Shortcuts action step in Drafts switches the current application from Drafts to Shortcuts and back, but in the post I cover another approach that can be utilised on the Mac to stay in Drafts.
Podcasts
Nothing I’ve done seems to have come up in conversation on any of my usual podcasts in the past month, but in browsing through my backlog of podcasts in Overcast I was surprised to discover that I’ve actually had a couple of passing and very positive mentions in Do By Friday episodes this year, which was truly wonderful to come across.
Forums
My forum time has been a little limited in December, but I think in general there felt like fewer posts being pushed out on my usual forum haunts.
Drafts
The Drafts forums were relatively busy in December, but I didn’t manage to spend a great deal of time responding to queries.
I offered some suggestions to a user who wanted to be able to export drafts periodically.
There was an unusual question on a hard-coded text replacement script and how to expand it to another set too and make it “the shortest”. I’m still unsure what the poster was looking for in terms of “shortest”, but I gave them some options.
Another user was also looking at running an action on a schedule or manually against all of the drafts in their inbox, which I again gave them a few ideas for.
One user seemed a little confused by the Drafts 35 release notes and if there was a new sync option introduced - there wasn’t.
I think I’d been bitten by this one in the past, but it is worth noting that Drafts' Evernote action step is not available on the Mac thanks to the mysterious mess for automation that Evernote became.
I provided one Drafts user with an Apple Shortcuts shortcut to create *or* append to a daily note in Drafts based on if the note already existed or not.
A blind Drafts user requested some help on formatting, spelling and grammar, which I hope I was able to get them on track for.
I gave one user who requested some information about using JavaScript to produce a file a non-JavaScript way of producing the file in the way they wanted as well as the JavaScript to go further if they required.
Remember If you don’t have the skills to scratch your own itch, it’s the perfect excuse to develop them
Someone asked about Mimestream actions for Drafts, but as that’s an e-mail platform, it isn’t clear what they wanted and we’re still waiting on the clarification.
There was a question on how to send a Drafts draft as a draft to Micro.blog. On this one I was once again saddened by the apathy of people to actually engage themselves on their own question, the poster not bothering to read the provided documentation which laid out what they needed to do. While I am very much the sort of person who sets out to teach people how to fish rather than handing them a fish, it does irk me when people won’t even take the rod they’ve been handed.
I pointed another poster to some documentation for how to write to Google Sheets
Finally, Greg added some updates for template tags in Drafts v35. The details are covered in this thread where he has an open request for comment.
Automators
The Automators forum was uncharacteristically quiet in December, and while I generally didn’t engage all that much on the forum, the same is probably true of everyone.
I provided a bit of additional information around Bluetooth beacons in relation to a query on using a bluetooth beacon to trigger an IFTTT applet or a script.
I referenced one of my previous posts on documenting shortcuts in a discussion about how do you document your Shortcuts?. I am a little surprised about how many people just use comments and consider that documentation. Even while there are tools today that can transform in code structured comments into pages of code documentation, that only documents the code, not the solution. Comments are vital, but only for very simple shortcuts should they even come close to being considered true documentation.
I shared a quick tip to someone having trouble deleting file bookmarks in Scriptable.
I helped one Apple Shortcuts user get to grips with weather forecast information in Shortcuts.
Other
Since Obsidian is a daily driver app for me on multiple platforms, I try and keep abreast of what’s going on in the space by lurking on the Obsidian forum, and reading the wonderful Obsidian Roundup. I had a nice surprise just before Christmas to see that one of my blog posts from last month got a mention in the 17 December Roundup posting.
I managed a few trips to one of the coffee shops near my in-laws over the festive period, and this gave me a bit of an opportunity to sort out a few Obsidian related tasks.
The first was just sorting out some filing that had been malingering since starting my new job. The high level structures were there, but I needed to catch up on some of the next level down structuring to get things in the place where I wanted them to be. But that went pretty well, and I created several new Templater templates and revised many existing ones. They should save me a lot of time in the future.
The second was that I’ve started working on a few things to help me with my Obsidian use on the Mac, utilising Alfred. I know that there are some Alfred workflows for Obsidian out there, but I’m working on approaches for things that I want to do that don’t require additional Obsidian plugins to be installed and activated in Obsidian. Once I have enough working functionality in the workflow, and I'm happy with how it's working, I’ll release it, but I expect this will take me a while to get to the point where I’m happy to do that.
However, if you are interested in automating with Obsidian and experimenting with plugins, I’m going to recommend taking a look at the Obsidian Actions URI plugin. This has been developed primarily for the Actions for Obsidian Shortcuts helper app that is currently in beta, but being based around extending the Obsidian URL scheme, you can utilise the plugin anywhere you can launch a URL.
The Alfred Gallery for workflows is now in early access. I make it there there are almost 100 workflows now available in the gallery, but to date, all of my workflows remain “in progress” on the submission sub-forum. I’ve had semi-regular contact from the Running with Crayons team, so I assume that they will be included at some point, but I guess they’ve been tackling a lot of the simpler workflows first to get the gallery bulked out.
Upcoming
I’m expecting to be doing a bit of travelling for personal reasons over the next few months, so this is either going to give me more time to create stuff, or less. I’m not sure yet. but, I’m going to continue getting content out, looking at the Alfred/Obsidian workflow, and probably revisiting some existing projects - the Thoughtasylum Action Groups for Drafts haven’t received any notable updates for quite some time, so I would like to set aside some time for that in particular.
I haven’t put any videos up on my tutorials site for a little while, and I do need to carve out some time for that. What I need though is time at home to do the recording - my workflow relies on some desk bound hardware.
Thank to everyone for your support over the last year, and here’s to 2023 and all the coffee fuelled productivity I may find in it.