MegaShortcut

I built one single shortcut for all my text-blogging options. I first choose the blog in which I wish to publish. Then I write a title for the post or leave it blank. Then I write the content. Depending on the blog I chose, the shortcut will present me a list of tags to choose from. If I’m on the Mac, the tags will be picked from a list. If it’s the iPhone or the iPad, the list will be drawn from Data Jar. The publishing is handled by Humboldt, a great tool by Maurice Parker. #geekery


The keyboard is mightier than the pen.


T.S. Eliot’s real words on copying and stealing

One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

Eliot, T.S., “Philip Massinger,” The Sacred Wood, New York: Bartleby.com, 2000.

The source of this quote is Nancy Prager’s research as shown in this 2007 article, so kudos to her.

I found it thanks to this 2011 post by David Barnard that was quoted by John Gruber here. Thanks to all of them.

And as a bonus, I found this source for authoritative quotations, that’s going straight to my bookmarks.


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.


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.