Friday

Difficult day at work, difficult week over all. But today I overcame my laziness and did go for a walk and shot some pictures. I’ll post them later. I got to feel like a hacker, too. And I made a potato omelette using a bag of chips, so I’ll never quit my main addiction, food. The day is ending with a smile, and that’s good.


I only tweaked two Shortcuts and I feel like a hacker

Success! I was able to tweak two Shortcuts that I use to publish to micro.blog and I’m so happy. I will document it here so I can come back to this in the future.

It’s all thanks to @jarrod, of course. In his wonderful Shortcut Library there’s many that I use daily. Most of all, one to Publish to Micro.blog and another one to Post Quotes from other webs.

But the thing is that they both publish to my default blog (https://umerez.eu), and I needed the same functionality to post in my new adventure, this very blog (https://estebantxo.micro.blog).

It was easy to fetch a new API key in micro.blog, but I needed something else to direct the posts to Estebantxo instead of umerez.eu.

I found the answer in this post from the official Micro.blog Help documents.

For users who have multiple microblogs configured, /micropub?q=config will return of the list of sites. You can post to a specific microblog by passing an mp-destination parameter of the URL (uid from the configured list).

Quite cryptic for me. Suddenly, I noticed that an action in @jarrod’s Shortcut (Get content from URL), which was set to POST, had a GET option too. So I made a Shortcut with that action to get my blogs and look for Estebantxo’s UID.

Screenshot of Shortcut to GET info from my blogs

I did get the desired uid and I put it in @jarrod’s Shortcut, under Headers, with a mp-destination key and the uidfor its corresponding value.

Screenshot of a Shortcut action

Et voilà. The Shortcut works like a charm. I posted this quote and cheered with happiness.


🚀 ℹ️ Posting API - Documentation - Micro.blog Help Center

For users who have multiple microblogs configured, /micropub?q=config will return of the list of sites. You can post to a specific microblog by passing an mp-destination parameter of the URL (uid from the configured list).

Need a way to test with multiple blogs? Every account can create a free test blog on the web under Design → Edit Custom Themes → New Test Blog.


I love Jacques Brel

And, for the enjoyment of Brel, Ladies & gentlemen, I give you Pomplamoose.

youtu.be/hvrBWn0Kx…


One thing is true though

I still don’t write for myself, I still do it for someone else, with the feedback of the crowd in my mind. I’m constantly thinking about how will my commentary be read by other people. Now I’m writing this only for me, to tell me that there’s nobody reading and that this is a journey of self-improvement that I’m choosing to walk alone.


Feedback junkie

I posted a couple of silly things and run to my Mastodon accounts to see if they had any feedback. The posts did not show up and it took me a minute to remember that I turned off cross-posting in both my blogs, precisely to prevent me from seeking the noise of social media. Old habits die hard, that’s for sure. My withdrawal syndrome is not that bad though and it still lets me make fun of myself.


Do I want to publish posts like this in my Estebantxo blog or do I want to keep this more personal and less obvious? I think it’s the latter. Since I want this page to be a live experiment and organically grow with its hits and misses, I won’t delete that post. But I’m going to take it to the umerez.eu blog and I will keep there the techy posts. Estebantxo, for now, is going to be a more personal place, like a journal of sorts.


Batch Link Downloader - A tool to download files from a website in bulk

I don’t use Google Chrome much but today I found a very useful tool that I want to share.

It’s called Batch Link Downloader, and it’s an extension that allowed me to easily download multiple files from a website.

Screenshot of Batch Link Downloader main page in Chrome extension catalog

I needed to download the whole documentation of my city’s Urban Plan. It’s a bunch of PDFs, classified by different categories and locations. This is the screenshot of one of the pages.

A long list of files in my City Council's site

I didn’t want to go through the tedious process of saving each and every one of the PDFs behind these links, so I looked for a tool and found this one. I guess there must be lots of them and many might be much better, but this one worked for me.

I clicked the extension and I was presented with a long list of downloadable links. I typed *.pdf to narrow down the list and I could even uncheck some of the available files that did not interest me. Then the batch download process went very smoothly and I had all the files in my Downloads folder in a minute.

Screenshot of the downloaders main window. Three arrows are pointing to the file selection checkbox, the box to type search criteria and the button to download the bulk of selected files

So it saved me a lot of time and boredom. Sure there’s other tools to scrap websites more automatically and efficiently, but this tool proved to be convenient and easy enough for me, and it let me target and download only what I needed, the PDFs.


Thursday

Today has not been a good day regarding work. I stayed at home so it was supposed to be a productive day, yet it wasn’t. I have a big deadline tomorrow, and I behaved as I often do in this situations: I get blocked and procrastinate. I procrastinated the heck out of my email, so at least that’s quite clean, Inbox Zero goal achieved. But tomorrow it’s going to be a very early start if I want to meet my deadline and craft a report worth its name.

On the positive side, I discovered Jatan Mehta’s journal blog. This particular post on Embracing a simple but effective digital life or Digital detoxing is very thorough and interesting and it is in the line of Manuel Moreale’s post On POSSE, which I briefly commented here.

My RSS feeds in NetNewsWire are starting to look very good.

What I’m thinking now is that I might quit social media altogether and embrace just blogging to express myself, RSS to read nice people’s blog and email to communicate with them. I’ll see.

Oh, and I also recovered my DSLR camera. I need to move my fat ass and taking walks with the excuse of taking pictures might be the way.


Wednesday

The day started quite productively, meeting a deadline one day ahead. Then, around 10am, everything went to hell. I’ve been attending unscheduled phone and zoom calls for the rest of the day. So my Friday deadline is in panic mode. At least I could take a moment to write to Manuel Moreale, because this post On POSSE resonated with me and I wanted to tell him I liked it. In my Twitter time, even in the more recent Mastodon world, my response would have been a star or a like o a thumbs up, maybe a short emphatical shout-out. Mostly empty and ephemeral. I’m liking this new slow approach to my digital life. I think it can make way to more meaningful connections. For starters, it felt good to write a longer and warmer email to a blogger whose example inspires me every day. Not that Manu has any obligation to respond. It did feel good and that’s enough. Time will tell.


Good lawyers know that every question about the law has the same answer: it depends. Excellent lawyers know how to explain it to their clients. Artists get paid by the hour for explaining it very slowly. #legal #eng


Cards Theme

I’m going to try the Cards Theme to see if it’s a good way to implement my idea of a static home page with cards or buttons for different sections. I really like Tiny Theme, but this early days are appropriate for experimentation. The other way is to learn a bit more of HTML and CSS, but there’s plenty of time to stop being lazy. Not today.


Tuesday

I want to find a way to use static pages to build my digital garden. I may use the blog format in some places, but there needs to be different sections, primarily static, and an Index home page that showcases and links to the those sections. First order of business, start thinking about the sections. Designing the site will come later.


Monday

Today I woke up at 4am. I have a long commute, so I took my car to work and arrived at my office before 6am. Other days I take the train, which is a longer travel, but it’s cheaper, more ecological and it gives me a place for focused work. It’s 11:30pm and I just finished to review my tasks of the day and prepared them for tomorrow. I have two big deadlines for Friday and today I did not push forward one single inch in any of them. Still, as I was reviewing the day, I saw that I did check off many other tasks that also needed to be done. Some clients were benefited from that work, some others are still waiting for me.


Wrapping up the week

So if I intend to grow my small corner of the world in this blog, I’d better start. I learned from Chris Aldrich that, if I am serious about something, I have to stick to it. He was talking about handwriting and taking notes or journaling with analog tools, but I’m going to take his advice and make it my own. If I want to be serious about my particular digital corner, I’d better stick to it.

So here I am, wrapping up the week and getting ready for Monday. I went through my OmniFocus review and I have a couple of dozen of things I have to do tomorrow, so it was not a pleasant review. I positively know I won’t do them all, so I marked my priorities and blocked a few slots in my calendar to make some sort of a plan. And hope for the best. But this week I moaned enough already, so I’m not going to bitch any more about how miserable my every day routine is 😉.

In micro.blog, I met a very nice guy this weekend [Michael H. Gerloff aka @kulturnation](https://micro.blog/kulturnation). He’s german, he writes in English in micro.blog and he seems a very interesting and nice guy. So that’s a good note for the week.

Oh, one thing I wanted to say a long time ago. I’ve tried mechanic keyboards enough, I’ve given them every chance. I don’t like them. I’m very happy with my Apple Magic Keyboard. It’s already a few years old and it still works like a charm and gives me my best writing experience. I always go back to this keyboard. At work I use a Logitech K380 that I like, too. But my home Magic Keyboard is the best. One thing I learned during the pandemic lockdown was to type properly with all my fingers and, although I still make many typos and my WPM is not championship-worthy, I’m the most fluent with the Magic Keyboard.

There, I’m going to bed. Tomorrow starts early.


For now, the cross-posting to Mastodon stays. Let people find estebantxo and reach out it they so wish. The link with @eumrz@esq.social will be gone, though.


Or, rather, I may reserve this garden for my most intimate things, the one’s that are closest to my heart. That might mean that linking to a Mastodon account might not be a good idea. If people find me, they find me. If nobody does, who cares, it’s just my particular and invisible corner of the world.


I guess I will slowly migrate my personal stuff from umerez.eu to estebantxo.com.


First

This is the first seed of the personal garden I want to build. My place, the corner of the world where I’ll get to be myself and collect the nice things that make me smile.

For starters, I want to enjoy the biggest smiles I’ve ever seen. Two guys enjoying a song together and living the moment at its fullest.

Chico Buarque and Edú Lobo singing Chega de saudade.

www.youtube.com/watch