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June 14, 2019 at 7:49pm

BBEdit

I’ve always had a version of BBEdit on my Mac. For a while it was TextWrangler, but now it’s back to BBEdit (unregistered). It’s one of those apps I don’t use very often, but when I want a pure Mac text editing experience, I know I can rely on it.

BBEdit can do a whole bunch of things that I don’t understand and have no need for.

But it is working very nicely as an integrated text editor for GitHub Desktop, and I feel like I might now benefit from the ‘unlocked’ version of BBEdit.

git software
June 14, 2019 at 7:22pm

More Tests

So now I have cloned my Blot repository into Github and am using Github desktop on the Mac. As this is editing via Github I have no idea how or if my edits here will make it to my site.

The nice thing about Github Desktop is it allowed me to easily open this whole project/site into BBEdit.

Update

At first this didn’t work, but it was simply because I’d forgotten to add the .md suffix to the file in BBEdit. So this stopped Blot’s renderer from creating the HTML version. At first I thought the file hadn’t uploaded. It had, but it was not showing on the web.

So this section has been added as an edit, which I should be able to push and commit as a new version of the same file.

git
June 14, 2019 at 2:52pm

I am writing this test post in iA Writer on iOS.

I’m going to try to share it over to Working Copy for publishing via Git.

Wish me luck.

iOS Integration

I’ve opened this file in iA Writer from the Working Copy files provider for the version stored on Blot.

What happens now?

git
June 14, 2019 at 1:47pm

Dropbox Is Bloating, So Move to Git?

This is literally a test post using Git instead of Dropbox. I have no idea what I’m doing with Git, but what could go wrong?

git
June 7, 2019 at 9:00am

Read-it-Later with…

I’ve used Instapaper relatively consistently since Marco Arment introduced it. Was that a decade ago now?

Occasionally I’ve stopped using it, or toyed with other services like Pocket, or Safari’s Reading List feature. In the end, however, I’ve always gone back to Instapaper.

Despite that usage, I’ve never been interested in any of the service’s ‘power user’ features. They’ve always felt disjointed from my larger workflows. My Instapaper history is an island of data that is unconnected from my other information, which is primarily kept in DEVONthink.

The End of Instapaper

At this point, I’m giving up on Instapaper. The finally nail in the coffin was the realisation of just how hard it was to get my data out of Instapaper. The RSS feed it provides is truncated, and links back to the Instapaper version and not the original article. So all my reading was excised from all my knowledge held in DEVONthink.

Fortunately, DEVONthink makes available a script that works in version 2.x (and not yet beta 3.0) that is able to create PDF versions of an Instapaper archive, using a CSV list of links available from Instapaper.

I was able to run this last night. It took about 3 hours to pull down over 2,000 articles. Now, these all exist within DEVONthink.

This experience has convinced me that I need a better way to manage my reading list such that I keep available my archive for more immediate use.

The Benefits

If this new process works, the benefits will be:

  1. One less app/service to deal with.
  2. Ubiquitous access via system-level extensions.
  3. An integrated corpus of information that can be better leveraged for future purposes.

Finding a Better Read-it-Later Workflow

My new workflow is still a work-in-progress.

I am going back to basics and plan to use Safari’s in-built Reading List feature. This has the benefit of being universally available across all Apple platforms. This will serve as my queue. From there I can push articles deemed worthy of keeping to DEVONthink for long-term archival.

Safari’s Reading List, combined with its Reader view, should be sufficient enough for most purposes. It doesn’t work offline, which was a key feature of Instapaper… but let’s be realistic. When am I ever offline?

When importing to DEVONthink I will most likely save it as a clutter-free web archive or Markdown. I can do this using the share sheet on iOS and the DEVONthink clipper/share extension with macOS.

DEVONthink 3 (currently in beta) offers a simple ‘Reading List’ feature similar to Safari’s, but it seems a bit underwhelming at this stage. The iOS version is older and doesn’t have this feature at all. It is unlikely that I will adopt this element into my workflow at this time.

Breaking Down the Steps

So, in summary, these are the workflow steps:

  1. Identify article at source generally through Safari or Fiery Feeds.
  2. Push the article to the system-level Safari Reading List.
  3. Read the article in Safari, optionally using Reader View.
  4. Capture article into DEVONthink using the share sheet, share extension/browser extension/clipper.
  5. Leverage DEVONthink’s ‘Groups’ feature to save the article to the correct location and the ‘See Also’ feature to find similar information.
workflow software reading devonthink instapaper
May 31, 2019 at 10:01pm

How Differential Gears Work

Watching things like this remind how little I know.