MailToYojimbo Script, With Tags Input and Growl Notification

For a long time I have been using Jim Correia’s MailToYojimbo AppleScript to send a currently selected message from Mail to Yojimbo as a new note. The original script, posted by Jim to the Yojimbo Mailing list about three years ago, was very bare bones — simply using the subject of the email as the title of the new note and the message body as the content.

I’ve made my own iteration of the MailToYojimbo script which adds a Tag input pane and Growl notification support. Now when invoked, the script prompts the user to enter any tags before the message is sent to Yojimbo, and subsequently displays a Growl notification once the note has been successfully created. (A hat tip to a couple scripts by John Gruber and Fraser Spiers for which the tag-input and Growl notification code is heavily based upon.)

Download

Updated on March 20, 2012 to work with the Mac App Store version of Growl.

MailToYojimbo Script, With Tags Input and Growl Notification

Reader’s Setup: Josh Farmer

For those chomping at the bit for a setup that doesn’t belong in a magazine, here is a real-life setup submitted by my real-life friend, Josh Farmer. Josh is one of the best dads, husbands, writers, and editors I know. He also has a flare for the sarcastic.

Josh’s Setup:

1. What does your desk look like?

It looks like my kitchen table. After a Church’s Chicken tornado.

Josh Farmer's Setup

Josh Farmer's Setup

2. What is your current Mac setup?

PowerBook G4 15″ laptop and a 500 GB backup disk somewhere in my house . . . really need to find that thing.

3. Why are you using this setup?

Because in my 900-square-foot home, it’s all I’ve got right now (besides the bathroom, which is apparently my fault). I have four children under the age of 5 (no twins), I’m in full-time school, work part-time, do editing and ghostwriting projects on the side, and consume all things related to Apple, Macintosh, and LOLCats. w00t!!!!!11!!

4. What software do you use on a daily basis, and for what do you use it?

Farmer Screenshot

Safari for the Web; iTunes for music; iPhoto for pictures; Word for, um, words; InDesign for editing .indd files (upgraded from MS Paint recently). Tinker Tool handles any UI system changes I want to make, but that usually comes down to changing fonts. (Right now I’ve got Hobo, Arial, and Comic Sans in various places. They are extremely legible because each letter is different.)

I have also found that keeping all my applications open makes them readily available and cuts down on their startup time. But I have to keep my iTunes kinda loud to drown out the funny sounds my drive sometimes makes — it’s a difficult balance during the kids’ naptime.

5. Do you own any other Mac gear?

I have an original iPod (called a Walkman). Oh, yeah, and I also have a 4GB iPod. It’s blue because I like blue. But it’s so difficult to use. I can’t even get it to play. Every time I hold it, I push the hold button to let it know what I’m doing, but it still won’t work. I have a puppy named Macintosh, so that should count I think.

6. Do you have any future upgrades planned?

You already forgot my answer to question #3, didn’t you? Seriously, though, if something breaks I’ll obviously have to replace it. They say necessity is the mother of all loans, right?

More Sweet Setups

Josh’s setup is just one in a series of sweet Mac Setups.

Reader’s Setup: Josh Farmer

The Link Post

Jorn Barger was on to something.

Back in 1997, when he coined the term “weblog”, his hope was that each site would contribute to the Web by amplifying the links its author liked best. And now, businesses, social networks, and publishing platforms are all thriving because we want other people to tell us about sweet stuff. And when we find it we want to share it too.

Community-run Sweet Stuff Aggregator1 will only show us so much. They excel at finding the stuff that may be interesting to everyone, but they are virtually impotent at promoting what would be truly fascinating to a few.

The sweetest stuff has to be unearthed and recommended by people we trust. Which is why everyone should blog. When you blog there are two types of entries:

  • The Post: your stuff.2
  • The Link: someone else’s stuff.

The Post is important because it’s where you give the world what you have to give. It doesn’t have to be cute, or complex, or mind blowing. Just genuine. (And preferably a good read.)

The Link is important too; this is where you become the Sweet Stuff Aggregator for your readers. The Link is a completely legitimate member of the weblog family and should be treated with just as much care as The Post.

But there’s a trick to The Link. By nature its intent is to send readers away from your site and over to someone else’s. Which means you’re not just a Sweet Stuff Aggregator, you’re also a Traffic Director…

And there is more than one way to aggregate and direct:

I. The Aside

As seen on: Geek & Mild / kottke.org / Ignore the Code

The Aside

The Aside is a Link Post in disguise. It often looks and acts just like a short post on your website — except you’re talking about someone else’s stuff. When people click on The Aside’s title they stay on your site, going to The Aside’s permalink. (Though, when viewed on your website, The Aside may or may not display a post title.)

What makes an Aside count as a Link Post at all are two things: (a) somewhere in the text is a link, and that link is the focal point of what The Aside is all about; and (b) The Aside is styled, written, or in some other way treated different so as to set it apart from The Post.

By nature of its format The Aside encourages a full read of what you’ve written rather than a quick scan followed by a click on the Link. Which means it’s also a huge opportunity for clever and informed writing — more so than any other type of Link Post. Which is why The Aside is ideal for those who like to bring up and discuss content on the web as if having a conversation with friends.

II. The Out and About

As seen on: Waxy Links / Daring Fireball / Airbag’s Longboard

The Out and About

The Out and About is nearly the opposite in style and nature as The Aside. Its primary purpose is to unearth news and content on the Web and send readers there uninterrupted.

What especially sets The Out and About apart is its feed format. Because not only do the Link Post titles point directly to the linked-to content, but so do those in the RSS feed.

The permalink to your Out and About is either found at the bottom of your post, or else not at all.

The Out and About is a great way to aggregate Sweet Stuff and point readers in that direction with maximum ease and brevity. But don’t use it as an excuse to avoid adding your own clever and informed words.

III. The DoubleTitle

As seen on: Michael Mistretta / Justin Blanton / and formerly on shawnblanc.net

An Example of The DoubleTitle

The DoubleTitle is like a step-sister of The Out and About. Its name comes from the way it displays in an RSS feed, where you see not only the link-post’s title, but also a duplicate “sub-title”, directly at the top of the content. Like so:

Clicking on the main post title from within the RSS feed sends readers to your permalink. Clicking on the sub-title in the RSS article sends reader to the linked-to article.

The advantage of The DoubleTitle is that the reader is by default sent to your post’s permalink as their starting point — the same default behavior as all but one of the link-post types. The disadvantage is the redundancy of two repeating titles, plus the loss of the first line of the post, as seen here:

The DoubleTitle in Fever

Despite this, The DoubleTitle has become a common, accepted, and even preferred format for The Link.

IV. The DownUnder

As seen on: shawnblanc.net (RSS Feed) / Subtraction (Website) / Hivelogic / Ryan Gonzalez

The DownUnder

The DownUnder places the link to the external article at the end of the post, while the permalink to the link post is still in the title (virtually the exact opposite layout as The Out and About).

The advantages of The DownUnder: it avoids the redundancy found in The DoubleTitle, and it has a more clearly defined link target than The Aside does. The disadvantage is that because it’s not as common as The Out and About, readers may get confused as to which link is pointing to where. (Which one to your stuff, which one to their stuff?)

V. The TitleFree

As seen on Tumblr sites: Minimal Mac / log.chrisbowler.com

tumblr.png

In The TitleFree the first ninety-or-so characters of the post usually make up the run-on title in the RSS feed.

Also, due to the “@usernames”, the “via usernames”, the nested links inside nested blockquotes, and so on, the reader must take great care which link they click on or they may end up somewhere other than the actual linked-to article you’re talking about.

However, The TitleFree — which commonly contains photos, quotes, links, and re-posted posts — looks fine in its native environment on your tumble blog, as well as in the Tumblr Dashboard. With a little bit of TLC, it could look good in an RSS reader as well.

An Aside Regarding The Out And About

So long as you’re aggregating sweet stuff, make sure you give everyone the biggest bang for their click.

Back in 2007, John Gruber experimented with his Linked List behavior in the Daring Fireball RSS feed. For years his links were pointing away from daringfireball.net, but for a week he let them point to his site to see the reader’s response. People overwhelmingly disliked it.

Concurring, John went back to the original format, saying, “I personally prefer the original style, with links pointing away from daringfireball.net, and most readers do too, so I switched it back. […] I’m convinced this is a better design, however. The point of the Linked List is to send you away from Daring Fireball to read or look at something elsewhere, and the feed format should reflect that.”

When The Link wasn’t as common as it is now, sending the reader away to the Sweet Stuff directly from the RSS feed made perfect sense. When readers were only readers, they would agree to let bloggers post something interesting and all they asked for in return was little bit of ‘why’ before being sent on to something sweet.

But now those readers are also bloggers, and – especially in the tech-savvy ring – a lot of those bloggers are publishing links, too. Even those without their own weblog are still aggregating Sweet Stuff on Twitter and Facebook.

When you read and write every day it’s helpful to know how you got somewhere to be able to give credit where credit is due; not only do you want to link forward to something great, you want to link backwards to where you got it from. Which is why the design and function of The Link on your website and in your RSS feed is so important. Like Merlin Mann once said, “If linkbloggers wrote more, shovelbloggers thought more, and a-listers cited more, the web would get 15% more interesting overnight.”

Your website is a non-communal, isolated starting point for your readers. If they follow your link, clicking the back button in their browser will return them to their starting point again, if need be. A feed reader, however, is more like a router piping in a whole community’s worth of stuff. If you follow a link out from your feed reader there is no back button to starting point; it’s buried in the feed reader.

Beginning from an isolated starting point is especially great for the times when you’ve sent me to something I find unusually sweet. Once I’m there chances are good I’ll want to: (a) re-read your comments about why you sent them there in the first place; and/or (b) link to it myself and credit you for the find.

If I got to the article directly from an Out and About Link in my feed reader then it’s up to my memory to remember who sent me there. Not a big deal if I’m eating lunch and am only taking the time to visit one or two new links. But that’s not how I most often consume stuff the Web.

The way I read online is that at some point in my day I will open up my feed reader and read through the latest stuff. I rarely read articles in my reader — instead, I open them in Safari in the background. After I’ve combed through my feed reader I then go to the open tabs in Safari and start reading.

At this point it’s not uncommon to have a dozen tabs with a dozen articles ready for me to read.3 Which is why – depending on your site’s posting rhythm and personality – sending people directly to your linked-to article is not necessarily the best design. Here’s why:

Since my feed reader is filled with sites and folks I’m familiar with, the majority of the open tabs in Safari are websites I affectionately recognize. But if I come to a tab with a site I don’t recognize my first thought is usually, what is this? Why am I here?

Because I don’t always remember exactly who’s link post I read to send me to that article, nor what it was they had to say about it that prompted me to visit, it’s a lot like coming back to a conversation without being able to ask, “Now, where were we?”

In an email, reader Jacob Pogson explained his similar reading workflow:

Some sites (eg. Coudal Partners) basically are all links. However, one is required to click particularly on the link within the post to go to the link, rather than just follow the post. I do not find that annoying. It is inefficient, yet I don’t mind having Safari go the the Coudal site and sit waiting for me to further direct it to the link.

I like to have the mental starting block of Coudal, before I follow the link; it’s almost like a context to the link. Similarly to you, I end with a whole lot of tabs (on a good day) that are the result of following articles/links from NetNewsWire. Changing to Safari is also a mental change to ‘serious’ digestion mode, where I have decided something requires another look.

This is exactly how I like to read on the Web. I am not so much concerned about reading quickly and efficiently, as I am reading with interest and intent.

The Out and About is efficient; it’s ideal for the power user who’s primarily interested in what is being aggregated more than who is aggregating it or why they are. My fear is that if more and more Cool Stuff Aggregators start linking with The Out and About, there will be an increasing disconnect between the aggregated and the Aggregator.

Which is why, when I switched from The DoubleTitle, I went to The DownUnder and not the Out and About. The DownUnder is a cleaner design, the post’s title sends readers to my link post’s permalink by default, and it has a very discernible click target — if you’ve read the title and the commentary in the feed reader, the link to the Sweet Stuff is right there if you want it.

The Why

Before linking something up, think for a moment…

Was it worth your time?

What makes for the best of the best, personally recommended link links is that it’s a selection of only what you find most inspiring and engaging. It’s the kind of stuff you would bring up at dinner:

“I saw this fascinating chart on The New York Times today about how we spend our time. Did you know it only takes 4% of Americans to keep our country running at night?”

You would never talk to your mom about the fifty free Photoshop brushes you found online today. Well, hopefully you wouldn’t.

Is it worth my time?

When I click your link it’s a commitment. I’ve agreed to let you post something interesting and all I ask for in return is little bit of why before being sent on to what you’ve deemed as something sweet.

And if I’m going to trust you to be my personal Sweet Stuff Aggregator, I want to know you’re not wimping out on me and just re-linking the same stuff everyone else is buzzing about. I want to know that you’re linking to it because it grabbed you — even if just for a second — and that you are confident it will grab me too.

But more than the what is the why. Noteworthy things will always have a way of getting discovered.

  1. See Alex Payne’s Essays, Fever and the Future of Feed Readers and CSAs; Gush for Je‘ ↵
  2. The reason it’s called “The Post” and not “The Article” is because not everyone publishes articles to their weblogs. Many people publish video, audio, and/or photography in addition to or instead of article. ↵
  3. And I’m a lightweight feed subscriber with picky taste about where I spend my time.↵
The Link Post

A Dedicated Table of Contents Page for Reviews  →

By far and away my favorite thing to write is an in-depth review. And based on feedback, they are also, by far, your favorite thing to read.

Currently, there are nearly 30,000 words worth of software and hardware reviews hidden on this site. And until today there wasn’t a one-stop-spot for all the reviews I’ve written. Which is why I felt it was high-time these articles became first-class citizens by receiving a dedicated table of contents page.

A Dedicated Table of Contents Page for Reviews

Reader’s Setup: Ian P. Hines

Ian P. Hines is a 23-year old technology geek and Baltimore Enthusiast. In the daylight hours he’s a Neighborhood Liaison in the Office of the Mayor of Baltimore, MD, but by night he’ll likely be found coding, scripting, and tweeting away. In September he’ll be having his first child, a boy. He’s been blogging since 2003.

Ian’s Setup:

1. What does your desk look like?

Ian Hines

Ian Hines

Ian Hines

2. What is your current Mac setup?

I’m currently using a 13″ MacBook (White), circa early 2009, as my sole computer. I kept it basic – 2 GHz Intel Cor Duo, 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM – as an exercise in relative minimalism, despite my inner geek urging me to go with the Pro. Backups are done via BackBlaze, which continuously syncs changed whenever I’m connected to WiFi.

When I’m on-the-go, which is most of the day, I’m stuck with (and I mean that) my BlackBerry 8703e(s) (I have two, one for work and one for personal use), courtesy of a two-year Verizon contract. Lets be clear: older BlackBerrys are terrible for anything except email. Period. The newer ones (I’m looking at you, Tour!) might… just might… be up to snuff, but I’m not holding my breath.

The personal BlackBerry isn’t going to be around for too much longer, as it seems to be feuding with my Mac. They aren’t talking at all, and I just can’t have that sort of tension in my life. But more on that in a bit…

3. Why are you using this setup?

I can’t say enough about how much I love the simplicity of this setup (sans BlackBerry).

A few years back, when my first ever laptop died, I made the decision to switch back to a tower. What an awful idea that was. One of the best parts of living in a city is all the great free WiFi (with associated coffee!), and having a desktop meant that I couldn’t bring my work with me. I was desk-bound, and experience has taught me that that just doesn’t work for me.

Now, with the baby on the way, I’ve taken up the challenge of dramatically reducing the amount of excess furniture in the house; the desk space was among the first things to go. These days it’s just me, my MacBook, and the couch. Or the chair. Or the coffee shop. That’s the thing… I work where I want and I love having that flexibility. I’ve found that the freedom to change my scenery has really helped me creatively, and I think that’s been reflected in my fresh approach to the web over the past several months.

4. What software do you use on a daily basis, and for what do you use it?

I’ve taken to using Spaces to keep my desktop strictly organized. I currently have twelve spaces, most of which are always active:

  • Space One is strictly for browsers. I’m a Safari 4 guy (a recent convert from Firefox 3).
  • Space Two is for social applications. Here you’ll find Tweetie & Adium opening at login.
  • Space Three houses NetNewsWire, though I think I’m about to catch a Fever.
  • Space Four is for the more formal correspondence, via Address Book & Mail.
  • Space Five is for the outsiders.
  • Space Six is the junk drawer, filled up with Stickies (galore?).
  • Space Seven runs iCal, which is used to access my Google CalDAV Calendars locally.
  • Space Eight runs iPhoto, and when I’m feeling particularly ambitious Lightroom.
  • Space Nine is the jukebox: iTunes, Last.fm, and PandoraFM.
  • Space Ten is where the magic happens, via Coda & Transmit (three cheers for the Panic Sale!).
  • Space Eleven is dedicated solely to Mint, because an app so beautiful deserves one all to itself.
  • And finally, Space Twelve for imaging with LittleSnapper & Photoshop CS 4.

In the background you’ll find these standbys: BackBlaze, Caffeine, Google Quick Search, & Growl.

5. Do you own any other Mac gear?

Sadly, no. My wife, however, is running a late-2008 unibody MacBook 13″, which replaced the white MacBook that we lost in a burglary last September. But I personally have been without any Mac peripherals since my fourth generation iPod finally died in 2007.

6. Do you have any future upgrades planned?

Considering I’m currently running my mobile web on the antiquated 8703e (thanks, Verizon!), an iPhone 3GS is looking pretty good right about now. My Verizon contract expires in November, though if the rumors of a Q1 Verizon iPhone are true that won’t really matter.

I also plan on adding a 500 GB Passport Hard Drive for photo storage, as I prefer to keep the internal drive pretty clutter free.

More Sweet Setups

Ian’s setup is just one in a series of sweet Mac Setups.

Reader’s Setup: Ian P. Hines

Every HTML Glyph You Could Ever Want (and Some That You Wouldn’t)  →

Thanks to all of you who have given feedback regarding the new link-post behavior in the shawnblanc.net feed. The consensus has very much been in favor of the new design for link posts.

There has also been a lot of encouragement to add a glyph to the front of each bionafied article’s title; done. Not only is the glyph helpful for quickly identifying a feed item as either a link or an article, but it also makes the articles a little bit more special.

And for any of you who also are exploring the depths of your RSS and link post behavior, this link is to the most comprehensive list of HTML glyphs I’ve ever seen.

Every HTML Glyph You Could Ever Want (and Some That You Wouldn’t)

Linked List URL Plugin for WordPress  →

This plugin by Jonathan Penn is the foundation for how I’m able to make adjustments to my RSS Feed Behavior.

It uses a custom field named linked_list_url (which you have to initially create yourself). If that field is populated when you publish a new post then that post’s template tag, the_permalink_rss, gets defined as the linked-to URL you pasted in.

Since the_permalink template tag stays unaltered there is a lot you can do with calls, functions, if/else loops, and more to get your link posts formatted just the way you want in your RSS feed and on your website.

Additionally, the kind and clever John Stansbury shared with me an edited version of the Press This bookmarklet that works directly in tandem with Penn’s plugin. This version of the bookmarklet adds the linked_list_url custom field to the Press This publishing window and auto-populates that field with the URL of the website you were on when you clicked the bookmarklet. It works on the iPhone, too, though it’s not iPhone optimized.

I’ve posted the code for the bookmarklet as a plain text file here.

Save this file as .php and drop it into your /wp_admin/ folder. Leave the “-cf” addition so the file stays in tact if you ever upgrade automatically. Also, you’ll need to edit the Javascript in your Press This bookmarklet’s address so it references the new press-this-cf.php file.

Linked List URL Plugin for WordPress