Archive for the ‘productivity’ Category

Making a quick email list

February 18th, 2010 at 4:02 pm

I coach my younger son’s YMCA basketball team and use email to send updates and reminders to the other parents. Today my wife needed that list of addresses to coordinate an after-game dinner with the parents of a (friendly) rival team. My first thought was to export the list as a vCard file from my Address Book and email it to her, but importing that into her Address Book would have led to several duplicates and more work for her to weed them out. Also, she had no interest in the phone numbers and other contact information I have for some of these parents; she just wanted the email addresses.

So I went ahead and did the vCard export, and typed up this simple Python filter:

 1:  #!/usr/bin/python
 2:  
 3:  contacts = open('/Users/drang/Desktop/contacts.vcf')
 4:  
 5:  for line in contacts:
 6:    if line[:3] == 'FN:':
 7:      print line[3:],
 8:    if line[:6] == 'EMAIL;':
 9:      colon = line.find(':')
10:      print line[colon+1:]

The name and path to the vCard file is in Line 3. I had the vCard file open in TextMate as I wrote the script. The lines with the important data looked like this:

FN:Ms. Laura Ipsum
EMAIL;type=INTERNET;type=HOME;type=pref:lipsum@gmail.com

Lines 5-10 were written with this format in mind. The output was a list of names and addresses

Ms. Laura Ipsum
lipsum@gmail.com

Ms. Dolores Amet
dolores@ametfamily.com

Ms. Elizabeth Consectetur
liz1729@aol.com

which I copied into a email to my wife. Five minutes of effort, maybe, with some interruptions.

I’m sure the script won’t handle every situation, but that’s OK. It was easy to write and it got me what I wanted quickly. I didn’t even save the script. I ran it within TextMate, using the Run Script command (⌘R) in the Python bundle. When I was done, I kept the script in an open window until I wrote this blog post around it.

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Post #1181 in mac, productivity, programming | No Comments

PNotes

February 11th, 2010 at 10:35 pm

Here are a few miscellaneous paragraphs about my no-server personal wiki system.

I’m tired of calling it “my no-server personal wiki system.” From now on it’ll be called PNotes, which will at least save me some typing. Its GitHub repository will remain the same.

PNotes is missing two things most wikis have: a history of edits and a search field. But it’s easy to overcome both of these limitations.

When I need to create a set of notes for a new project, I copy the PNotes notes folder—my local version of what’s in the GitHub repository—to the new project’s folder and delete the .git subdirectory inside it. I then issue a

git init

command from within notes. This starts up a new git history that will focus not on the programming, which probably won’t change at all, but on the content files. From this point on, I use git add and git commit whenever I think it’s warranted. I’ve thought about putting git commit into the PNotes makefile, forcing a commit whenever I modify or make new HTML pages, but so far I haven’t done so. I prefer the freedom of committing only when I can think up a good commit comment.

Searching hasn’t been as big a deal as I first thought it would be. Normally, I know exactly which note page will have the information I’m looking for, and finding it is simply a matter of scrolling or using the browser’s Find command on that page. For those few occasions when I couldn’t remember where a piece of information is, I just opened a Terminal window in notes and used grep to find what I was looking for. This is not as smooth a solution as having a folder-wide search field available from the browser, but given the rarity of these searches, an in-browser solution just isn’t worth the effort.

One other thing I typically do when I create a new PNotes folder for a project: I replace the generic folder icon with a Moleskine notebook icon like one of these:

I found one of these, at a larger size, by doing a Google Image search and made the others by fiddling with the band color in Acorn. It’s nice to have the PNotes folder stand out.

A reminder on how to change the icon of a folder:

  1. Open the image you want to use and copy it to the clipboard.
  2. In the Finder, do a Get Info on the folder you want to change.
  3. Select the folder’s icon at the top of the Get Info window by clicking on it.
  4. Paste. The generic folder icon should be replaced by the image on the clipboard.

This post has turned out to be a bit more miscellaneous than I’d planned.

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Post #1175 in mac, productivity, programming, text editing | No Comments

The no-server notes wiki

February 10th, 2010 at 4:32 pm

I’ve just pushed a new version of my unnamed no-server notes wiki to its GitHub repository. Notes can now be organized in subdirectories instead of all being at the top level. Here’s the README.

This is a no-server personal wiki system that I created to keep track of project notes for work. I’ve put it here because it may be useful to others.

Goals

This is what I want:

  1. A self-contained file or folder of files that includes everything needed to write and view the notes. I want it to be easy to copy from one computer to another and to archive to DVD. This eliminates most of the available wiki systems, which store everything in a central database.
  2. The notes themselves to be written in Markdown rather than some specialized wiki markup. I write everything in Markdown and don’t want to shift context when switching from notes to a report. In fact, I’d like to be able to copy directly from my notes—markup included—when writing a report.
  3. To write the notes in my text editor of choice rather than in an HTML text input box or a word processor. Currently, that editor is TextMate, but TextMate itself isn’t the point. The point is to take advantage of the comfort I feel working in my normal editor. There’s a reason old Unix hackers like to do everything in Emacs or vi; it’s just more efficient to do all your text work in one environment.
  4. To be able to change the visual style of the notes as my needs or tastes change.
  5. To create new notes quickly and easily.

Requirements

Apart from what’s in the repository, you’ll need

If you need to include mathematical formulas in your notes, you should consider installing Davide Cervone’s jsMath. Once you’ve installed it, you can activate jsMath in the notes by uncommenting Line 10 of the header.tmpl file and adjusting the jsmathpath variable in the project.info file to point to jsMath’s easy.js file.

File structure

The top level of the notes directory contains all the support files, that is, all the files that are distinct from the notes themselves. These files are:

Notes files contain the actual content. These files should all have the extension .md and can be in both the top-level directory and in subdirectories. Two sample notes files are included: aa-overview.md in the top-level directory, and testing1.md in the Lab subdirectory.

Creating notes

As mentioned above, notes are just plain text files written in Markdown and saved with an .md extension. The first line will be the note’s title and will appear in the sidebar.

I use ATX-style headers, with hash marks indicating the header level, and I start each file with a first-level header, like this:

    # Overview #

The build system is smart enough to get rid of the hash marks when making up the sidebar.

Notes files in subdirectories appear with greater indentation under the name of the directory—like an outline. Within each directory, the notes are ordered alphabetically according to their file names, so you can rearrange the order in which the notes appear in the sidebar by changing the file names without changing their content. At present, there’s no way to change the order of the subdirectories.

Executing make from the top-level directory will generate all the HTML pages, which can be opened with any browser. Subsequent executions of make will generate only those pages whose .md files are new or have been modified. Executing make clean will erase all the HTML files, but will not touch the .md files.

Editing notes

You can, of course, open any .md file in any text editor to make changes. If you’re using TextMate on a Mac, there’s a faster way: click the Edit in TextMate link in the side bar to instantly open the .md file in TextMate—no need to switch to the Finder, open the folder, and double-click the file icon. If you’re a BBEdit user, you can do the same thing, but you’ll probably want to change the name of the link. It’s on Line 33 of header.tmpl.

More details

I wrote a three-part series of blog posts describing this system and its scripts, here, here, and here. The scripts have changed since then, but the basic ideas are the same.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Do what you want with it, but provide a link back to either my blog posts or to my repository.

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Post #1173 in mac, productivity, programming, text editing | No Comments

S5

February 9th, 2010 at 4:14 pm

On Super Bowl Sunday I got a crash course in S5, the Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System by Eric Meyer. It’s pretty impressive, something I would almost certainly use if I were frequently giving slide show presentations.

My older son had made a Keynote presentation for a school project and needed to convert it to PowerPoint in order to run it on a Windows machine in class. The conversion seemed to work, but when I insisted he test it on a neighbor’s computer (we don’t have a working Windows computer, and I had recently uninstalled Parallels from our shared iMac), we learned that the movies embedded in the presentation wouldn’t run. My son had shot the movies with my Canon G10, which saved them in QuickTime, a format that PowerPoint doesn’t like.

I looked into converting the movies to other formats, but couldn’t quickly find a format that was compact, of decent quality, and PowerPoint-compatible. The paid versions of Flip4Mac probably would have made good looking WMVs, but I didn’t want to shell out for a single use.

So I downloaded the S5 template, looked at its structure and at the primer, and did a couple of tests. It worked perfectly right away, so I showed my son how to pull the text out of his Keynote presentation and wrap it in the appropriate tags. While he was doing that, I looked up how to embed QuickTime movies in HTML and gave him the skeleton code to add and modify on every slide that needed a movie. With a couple of lines of CSS to shift the content a bit to the right, the presentation was finished.

All the text content of the presentation is in a single HTML file. The individual slides are kept in <div>s like this:

<div class="slide">
<h1>[slide title]</h1>
<ul>
<li>[point one]</li>
<li>[point two]</li>
<li>[point three]</li>
<li>[point four]</li>
<li>[point five]</li>
</ul>
</div>

You’re not limited to bullet points, of course. Anything you can do in HTML that fits on a single screen can be put between the slide <div>s. The slide-to-slide control of the presentation is handled by some clever JavaScript and CSS.

The great thing about presentations made with S5 is that they run everywhere—Windows, Mac, Linux, even the iPhone. If your client wants a copy of your presentation after a meeting, you just give her the folder with the presentation and tell her to open the HTML file in Firefox or Safari.1

The only thing I didn’t like about S5 is that it forced me to work in HTML instead of Markdown. It wouldn’t take much to write a script that converts Markdown to HTML and inserts it into the S5 template. You could also use Pandoc to do the conversion, but

Oh, I believe it. I’ve done it.

Update 2/9/10
Mark Eli Kalderon, an old hand with plain text formatting, tweeted me about the S5 Bundle for TextMate, which uses Markdown to format the slides. I installed it and gave a short tryout.

It certainly works well, but it has one fatal flaw from my perspective: the S5 support files—the CSS and JavaScript—are stored within the bundle itself, and the generated HTML refers to those files. Thus, the presentation is hard-wired to my particular installation of TextMate. While this keeps duplication of files to a minimum, it means I don’t have a self-sufficient folder of files that I can put on a thumb drive or give to someone else.

  1. My son’s presentation didn’t seem to work in Internet Explorer, probably because S5 is standards-based and IE isn’t. For safety’s sake, I had him put a copy of Portable Firefox on his thumb drive in case the school computer had only IE. ↩

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Post #1171 in education, productivity | No Comments

A new pocket pen

February 6th, 2010 at 1:02 pm

This morning I dropped our van off for a brake job and was killing time at a nearby Staples while my wife came to pick me up. While I was there, I found these house brand mini gel pens (item #636172) and picked up a box of twelve for about $5.

When closed, the pen is about the same length as a Fisher Space Pen, which is a convenient size for keeping in my pocket. When open, it’s a little shorter than the Fisher, but still easy to write with.

Why do I want to replace the Space Pen? Mainly because it doesn’t leave a smooth line. I’ve stuck with it because of its size and because its ink doesn’t smear. Generally, I prefer gel pens like the Pilot G2, but

  1. Their ink is a little smeary, which isn’t a big deal in the office, but can be a real pain out in the field.
  2. Their mini pens are hard to find nowadays.

The Staples pen leaves a smooth line that dries instantly on the paper I typically use. I can run my finger across something I’ve just written and get no smearing whatsoever.

Another advantage of the Staples pen over the Fisher is pocket clip. I doubt I’ll be cliping it in my pocket very often, but it will keep the pen from rolling off slanted surfaces, a constant problem with the Fisher.

The biggest downside of the Staples pens is that they feel cheap—mainly because they are. At least I won’t worry much about losing them. If I remember right, the Space Pen cost as much as four dozen of these.

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Post #1169 in productivity | 5 Comments

More Avery labels

February 4th, 2010 at 4:02 pm

This week I had to create lots of small labels to attach to laboratory samples. To make this easier, I modified my file folder label script to handle the smaller Avery 5167 labels, the kind usually thought of as return address labels.

The new program, called ptlabels (“print tiny labels”), follows the same logic as the old one and uses the same command-line options. You can tell it which row and column to start on through the -r and -c options. The input format is also the same:

As an example, this input

#Lorem project|1234
Sample 1

Sample 2

Sample 3

Sample 4

Sample 5

Sample 6

Sample 7

Sample 8

#Dolor project|9876
Sample 1

Sample 2

Sample 3

Sample 4

passed to

ptlist -r 3 -c 2

generates this output

As with the file folder label script, I find it easiest to run the script in TextMate via Filter Through Command… (⌥⌘R).

The script is in Perl, because that was my main language back when I wrote the original version. Rewriting in from scratch in Python would have been a waste of time.

  1:  #!/usr/bin/perl
  2:  
  3:  use Getopt::Std;
  4:  
  5:  # Usage/help message.
  6:  $usage = <<USAGE;
  7:  Usage: ptlabels [options] [filename]
  8:  Print tiny labels on Avery 5167 sheets
  9:  
 10:    -r m : start at row m (range: 1..20; default: 1)
 11:    -c n : start at column n (range 1..4; default: 1)
 12:    -h   : print this message
 13:  
 14:  If no filename is given, use STDIN. A label entry is a plain text
 15:  series of non-blank lines. Blank lines separate entries.
 16:  
 17:  The first line of an entry is special. If it starts with a #, then it's
 18:  considered a header line. Everything in the header line up to the | is
 19:  printed flush left in bold and everything after the | is printed flush
 20:  right in bold. Subsequent lines are printed centered in normal weight.
 21:  If the first line of an entry doesn't start with #, it uses the header
 22:  of the previous entry.
 23:  USAGE
 24:  
 25:  # Set up geometry constants for Avery 5167.
 26:  $topmargin = 0.55;
 27:  $pocol[1]  = 0.45;
 28:  $pocol[2]  = 2.50;
 29:  $pocol[3]  = 4.55;
 30:  $pocol[4]  = 6.60;
 31:  $lheight   = 0.50;
 32:  
 33:  # get starting point from command line if present
 34:  getopts('hr:c:', \%opt);
 35:  die $usage if ($opt{h});
 36:  
 37:  $row = int($opt{r}) || 1;    # chop off any fractional parts and
 38:  $col = int($opt{c}) || 1;
 39:  
 40:  # Bail out if position options are out of bounds
 41:  die $usage unless (($row >= 1 and $row <= 20) and 
 42:                     ($col >= 1 and $col <= 4));
 43:  
 44:  # Set initial horizontal and vertical positions.
 45:  $po = $pocol[$col];
 46:  $sp = ($topmargin + ($row - 1)*$lheight);
 47:  
 48:  # Pipe output through groff to printer (manual feed).
 49:  open OUT, "| groff | lpr -o ManualFeed=True";
 50:  # Change to PDF before sending to printer.
 51:  # open OUT, "| groff | ps2pdf - - | lpr -o ManualFeed=True";
 52:  # Preview output instead of printing directly.
 53:  # open OUT, "| groff | ps2pdf - - | open -a /Applications/Preview.app";
 54:  # Print raw troff code for debugging.
 55:  # open OUT, "> labels.rf";
 56:  select OUT;
 57:  
 58:  # Set up document.
 59:  print <<SETUP;
 60:  .vs 12
 61:  .nf
 62:  .ll 1.50i
 63:  .ta 1.50iR
 64:  
 65:  SETUP
 66:  
 67:  # The troff code for formatting a single entry, with placeholders for
 68:  # positioning on the page. The magic numbers embedded in the formatting
 69:  # commands make the layout look nice.
 70:  $label = <<ENTRY;
 71:  .sp |%.2fi
 72:  .po %.2fi
 73:  .ps 10
 74:  .ft HB
 75:  %s
 76:  .ps 10
 77:  .ft H
 78:  .ce 2
 79:  %s
 80:  .ce 0
 81:  ENTRY
 82:  
 83:  # Slurp all the input into an array of entries.
 84:  $/ = "";
 85:  @entries = <>;
 86:  
 87:  $bp = 0;                  # we don't want to start with a page break
 88:  
 89:  foreach $body (@entries) {
 90:    # Parse and transform the header and body.
 91:    if ($body =~ /^#/) {    # it's a header line
 92:      ($header, $body) = split(/\n/, $body, 2);
 93:      $header = substr($header, 1);
 94:      $header =~ s/\|/\t/;
 95:    }  
 96:    $body =~ s/\s+$//;
 97:  
 98:    # Break page if we ran off the end.
 99:    if ($bp) {
100:      print "\n.bp\n";      # issue the page break command
101:      $bp = 0;              # reset flag
102:    }
103:    
104:    # Print the label.
105:    printf $label, $sp, $po, $header, $body;
106:    
107:    # Now we set up for the next entry.
108:    $col = ($col % 4) + 1;      # step to next column
109:    $po = $pocol[$col];
110:    if ($col == 1) {            # we just went down a row
111:      $row++;
112:      if ($row > 20) {          # we just went off the bottom
113:        $bp = 1;                  # start a new page
114:        $row = 1;                 # at the top
115:      }
116:      $sp = ($topmargin + ($row - 1)*$lheight);
117:    }
118:  }

The geometry constants in Lines 26-31 were initially set by making measurements of the labels and then adjusted through trial and error until the printing was nicely aligned with the die cuts on the label sheets. The final values are based not only on the sheet geometry, but also on how the labels pass through my printer via the manual feed slot. For good alignment on another printer, the values might need adjusting by a few hundredths.

Line 49 was also written with my default printer in mind. Because it’s a PostScript printer, I can take the PostScript output directly from groff and pipe it to lpr—no need to convert it first to PDF and no need to use lpr’s -P option to tell it which printer to use. (The -o option should be self-explanatory.)

Line 51 (commented out) is an example of what you may need to do if you don’t have a PostScript printer.

51:  # open OUT, "| groff | ps2pdf - - | lpr -o ManualFeed=True";

Ps2pdf is part of Ghostscript, an open source suite of PostScript utilities that doesn’t come with OS X, but which I find invaluable. The two hyphens after ps2pdf tell it to use standard input and output instead of files on disk.

A more Mac-like possibility is shown in Line 53:

53:  # open OUT, "| groff | ps2pdf - - | open -a /Applications/Preview.app";

This generates the PDF and opens it in Preview so you can see it before printing. I’m a wild and impetuous sort of guy, so I just send it off the printer and let the ink fall where it may.

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Post #1168 in productivity, programming | No Comments

My script hall of fame

January 27th, 2010 at 1:25 pm

Many of my posts here have been about the writing—or rewriting or rerewriting—of scripts to automate the dull, repetitive, clicky-click tasks so common to computer use. While almost all of these scripts have been worthwhile, a few have proved so useful that I use them on a weekly or even daily basis. These are the member of my personal scripting hall of fame.

Folder labels

I like the project file folders in my office to have crisp laser-printed labels. There are plenty of templates out there for Avery labels and their clones, but they’re usually made for MS Word or some other program I don’t use. Also, there’s a lot of repetitive typing associated with those templates, and I obviously want to avoid that. So I wrote a script called pflabels that takes plain text input in a simple format and generates output for printing on a sheet of 1″×4″ labels (Avery 5261 or the equivalent).

The input looks like this:

#Kernighan Building|4215
Drawings

Contract

Correspondence

Photographs and
videotape

#Ossanna Residence|4332
Report

Correspondence

The headings, which have the project name and number separated by the pipe character (|), are denoted with an initial hash symbol (#), and individual labels are separated by blank lines. If I’m going to make several labels for the same project (which is usually the case), I need only enter the heading once. The script takes two options, -r and -c, which tell it which row and column to start on, so it can print on label sheets that have been partially used.

I generally type up my label input in TextMate and then run pflabels on that input via the Text>Filter Through Command… (⌥⌘R) command.

Screenshot uploader

This script, called snapftp:

  1. Takes a snapshot of some portion of my computer screen.
  2. Names it.
  3. (Optionally) resizes it.
  4. (Optionally) uploads it to my blog.
  5. Puts the URL of the uploaded image on the clipboard for pasting into a post.

I’ve configured FastScripts to run snapftp with the ⌃⌥⌘4 key combination, a minor variation on the Apple-standard ⌘⇧4 key combo.

There are certainly commercial products that do some or all of these things, but none are so perfectly tuned to my way of working. I can’t imagine going back to writing posts like this without it.

Markdown links in TextMate

I write almost everything in Markdown, mainly because I can forget about the formatting and just type, but also because it’s so easy to read. To keep the visual clutter to an absolute minimum, I use reference-style links, which puts all the URLs at the bottom of the document, out of the flow of the text.

I use three TextMate command/snippet/macros to do this:

The first two are described here, and the third is described here. They’re a bit complicated to set up but are wonderfully simple to use. I should probably turn them into a Bundle for easier installation.

URL getters for TextExpander

This started out as a set of scripts for getting the URL (or a shortened version of the URL) of the page showing on the visible tab of the frontmost Safari window, and the scripts were triggered by key combinations defined in FastScripts. Then, after seeing this tip by Jeff Gamet, I turned them into a set of TypeIt4Me snippets. When I switched from TypeIt4Me to TextExpander, I moved the snippet over and that’s what I use today.

The two workhorses are:

I tend to use the first when writing posts like this or email and the second when using links on Twitter. The great advantage is that I can add a link to a page I’ve been reading without having to switch back to Safari to get it.

More recently, I added a few more snippets for getting the URLs of the first, second, third, and fourth Safari tabs, regardless of whether they are frontmost.

BBC Radio recording scripts for Audio Hijack Pro

These scripts, written in Python and AppleScript, differ from those described above in that I never actually run these scripts myself. They’re run automatically on a schedule set in Audio Hijack Pro, and they record and tag certain BBC Radio 2 shows and put them into my iTunes library for syncing with my iPod. In effect, they turn shows that aren’t podcasts into podcasts for me.

The scripts are described here and they’re also available in this GitHub repository.

Library loan tracking

This script, like the set of BBC scripts, is run automatically—in this case, by a launchd process. Every morning, it logs in to my local library and gathers information on all the items my family has checked out or on hold. It then sends that information to my wife and me in a nicely formatted email.

Now it’s true that my library emails us a notice shortly before an item is due, but the advantage of this system is that we see everything at once and can gather up all the books that will be due in the next several days before going to the library to make a return. And we don’t have to remember to sign on to the library’s web site; the information is delivered to us every day.

Suspend and sleep screen

This is a pretty recent script, but I’ve come to love it. Without logging me out, it suspends my user session and puts the display to sleep. Seeing the Desktop swing around in that cube animation (which I’ve been a fan of since Andy Hertzfeld used a simplified version of it in Switcher) has become the visual signal that my day at work is over.

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Post #1161 in mac, productivity, programming | No Comments

Paper picking

January 18th, 2010 at 10:54 am

Last week a client sent me a bunch of paperwork to go through as part of an engineering analysis of a broken device. Part of the file was a photocopied product manual, the pages of which, unfortunately, had not been collated by the copy shop. So I had a run of odd-numbered pages, then a run of even-numbered pages, then another run of odds, another run of evens, and so on. The manual was a few hundred pages long—long enough to make the collation annoying but not so long that I felt justified in sending it out to a local print shop to do the job. I would be doing it myself.

I made an odd stack and an even stack and began the tedious process of putting the two together. The trick to making this go smoothly is to set up the stacks so that picking off individual sheets is easy. I’ve noticed, when seeing others sort through paper, that most people don’t know how to do this; there’s a lot of unnecessary (and unsanitary) wetting of fingers to try to keep from grabbing sheets two and three at a time. So I’m going to demonstrate how to avoid that. If I were 20 or 30 years younger, I’d probably call this a “lifehack,” which proves that there are some advantages to growing older.

The trick is to get the sheets offset a bit from one another so your thumb will touch only one sheet as you run it along the edge. Here are the four steps:

  1. Pinch the sheets together at one end.
  2. Bend the sheets, which will cause them to slide into a stairstep pattern at the other end.
  3. Pinch the other end while the sheets are still bent and release your pinch on the first end.
  4. Straighten the sheets, which will leave you with a stairstep pattern at both ends.

In these edge-view sketches, I’ve exaggerated how much the pages shift as you bend the sheaf. In reality, you’ll have to repeat the process a few times to get the offset big enough. When you’re done, the pages will be nicely arranged.

I’ve used this trick for sorting photos and card stock, too. Thicker sheets slide farther with each bend, but you have to be careful not to crease them.

As a structural engineer, I see the connection between this trick and the development of shear stresses in beams, but I’ve been nerdy enough for one post and won’t inflict that on you.

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Post #1157 in productivity | No Comments

HTML notes

January 14th, 2010 at 11:12 pm

Every once in a while, I spend a little time Googling to see if someone has made a personal wiki system—or any wiki system, really—that will work better for my project notes than the home-grown system I developed a couple of years ago. When I took one of those trips around the internet last week, I returned, as always, empty handed and with a growing sense that I was never going to find what I was looking for. So I’ve decided to put a little effort into my existing system and make it easier to use.

I wrote about this note-taking system, a serverless wiki, in a series of three posts back in 2008. The first of those posts described what I wanted out of the system, and the latter two posts went into how I use it and some details of the programming. At the risk of being repetitive, this is what I want in a personal wiki:

  1. A self-contained file or folder of files that includes everything needed to write and view the notes. I want it to be easy to copy from one computer to another and to archive to DVD.
  2. The notes themselves to be written in Markdown. I write everything in Markdown and don’t want to change.
  3. To write my notes in my text editor of choice. Currently, that editor is TextMate, but TextMate itself isn’t the point. The point is to take advantage of the comfort I feel working in my normal editor.
  4. To be able to change the visual style of the notes as my needs or tastes change.
  5. To create new notes quickly and easily.

Were it not for Items 2 and 3, I’d be using VoodooPad. Were it not for Items 3 and 4 (and a small incompatibility with Safari), I’d be using TiddlyWiki or one of its offshoots. But I’m not interested in compromising on these things, so it looks like I’ll be sticking with my self-made system. Which works, but could use some polish and a new feature or two.

To that end, I did a little code cleanup, put it under revision control, and set up a repository for it on GitHub in anticipation of making some improvements over the next few weeks. I want to:

In addition, I may change the build system that drives the conversion of notes from Markdown (for writing) to HTML. Currently, I’m using make, which has the advantage of ubiquity, but which also has a clumsy syntax that I’ve never felt confident in using. I know there are several alternatives, but I don’t know enough about them yet to choose among them.

I probably won’t write any more about it until I think these improvements are complete, but you can follow the repository if you want to track my progress.

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Post #1154 in productivity, programming, text editing | No Comments

Simple thanks

January 12th, 2010 at 11:56 am

Like many people, I first learned of Simplenote through John Gruber’s Daring Fireball post from last summer. I bought the app and liked it from the beginning, even though it had some user interface problems. Using Simplenote paid off yesterday, when I became one of the WhySimplenote contest winners. (Twitter links to these two posts were my entries.)

Winners got a $30 iTunes gift card, which I’ll put to use immediately, and an upgrade to Premium service, which may give me the kick in the pants I need to start work on the syncing script I’ve had in mind ever since the Simplenote API came out. Thanks, Cloud Factory!

My favorite part of the winners announcement was the descriptions of what the other winners were doing with Simplenote. I was particularly taken with Andrew’s entry:

In my college share room, there’s five of us, but it’s my job to get the groceries. Each of us have access to the online component of Simplenote.

Whenever someone remembers something we/they need from the shops (often while daydreaming in lectures), they just type it onto the web app from their laptop.

Then, when I’m at the shops, I just take out my iPhone to look at the collaborative shopping list that’s been generated over the week. I never forget to get anything since I have a list, everyone has everything they need for the week, and there’s minimal stress since everyone can do it in their own time - not when I’m going out the door shouting to ask whether anyone needs anything.

Works great.

This is something I never would have thought of, but it fits Simplenote perfectly. Makes me sure there are more clever uses that I’m missing.

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Post #1153 in internet, iphone, productivity, software, text editing | No Comments

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