Putting it All Together

In this final post I'll be writing up how everything fits together. As a recap, here are the steps I go through to create and publish a new post

Create Post

  1. Create .md for my new post
  2. write my words
  3. edit post
  4. Change status from draft to published

Publish Post

  1. Run make html to generate the SQLite database that powers my site's search tool1
  2. Run make vercel to deploy the SQLite database to vercel
  3. Run git add <filename> to add post to be committed to GitHub
  4. Run git commit -m <message> to commit to GitHub
  5. Post to Twitter with a link to my new post

My previous posts have gone over how each step was automated, but now we'll 'throw it all together'.

I updated my Makefile with a new command:

tweet:
    ./tweet.sh

When I run make tweet it will calls tweet.sh. I wrote about the tweet.sh file in Auto Generating the Commit Message so I won't go deeply into here. What it does is automate steps 1 - 5 above for the Publish Post section above.

And that's it really. I've now been able to automate the file creation and publish process.

Admittedly these are the 'easy' parts. The hard part is the actual writing, but it does remove a ton pf potential friction from my workflow and this will hopefully lead to more writing this year.

  1. make vercel actually runs make html so this isn't really a step that I need to do. ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Wed 09 February 2022

Automating the file creation

In my last post Auto Generating the Commit Message I indicated that this post I would "throw it all together and to get a spot where I can run one make command that will do all of this for me".

I decided to take a brief detour though as I realized I didn't have a good way to create a new post, i.e. the starting point wasn't automated!

In this post I'm going to go over how I create the start to a new post using Makefile and the command make newpost

My initial idea was to create a new bash script (similar to the tweet.sh file), but as a first iteration I went in a different direction based on this post How to Slugify Strings in Bash.

The command that the is finally arrived at in the post above was

newpost:
    vim +':r templates/post.md' $(BASEDIR)/content/blog/$$(date +%Y-%m-%d)-$$(echo -n $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

which was really close to what I needed. My static site is set up a bit differently and I'm not using vim (I'm using VS Code) to write my words.

The first change I needed to make was to remove the use of vim from the command and instead use touch to create the file

newpost:
    touch $(BASEDIR)/content/blog/$$(date +%Y-%m-%d)-$$(echo -n $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

The second was to change the file path for where to create the file. As I've indicated previously, the structure of my content looks like this:

content
├── musings
├── pages
├── productivity
├── professional\ development
└── technology

giving me an updated version of the command that looks like this:

touch content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

When I run the command make newpost title='Automating the file creation' category='productivity' I get a empty new files created.

Now I just need to populate it with the data.

There are seven bits of meta data that need to be added, but four of them are the same for each post

Author: ryan
Tags:
Series: Remove if Not Needed
Status: draft

That allows me to have the newpost command look like this:

newpost:
    touch content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Author: ryan" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Tags: " >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Series: Remove if Not Needed"  >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Status: draft"  >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

The remaining metadata to be added are:

  • Title:
  • Date
  • Slug

Of these, Date and Title are the most straightforward.

bash has a command called date that can be formatted in the way I want with %F. Using this I can get the date like this

echo "Date: $$(date +%F)" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

For Title I can take the input parameter title like this:

echo "Title: $${title}" > content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

Slug is just Title but slugified. Trying to figure out how to do this is how I found the article above.

Using a slightly modified version of the code that generates the file, we get this:

printf "Slug: " >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
echo "$${title}" | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

One thing to notice here is that printf. I needed/wanted to echo -n but make didn't seem to like that. This StackOverflow answer helped me to get a fix (using printf) though I'm sure there's a way I can get it to work with echo -n.

Essentially, since this was a first pass, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up re-writing this as a shell script I didn't want to spend too much time getting a perfect answer here.

OK, with all of that, here's the entire newpost recipe I'm using now:

newpost:
    touch content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Title: $${title}" > content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Date: $$(date +%F)" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Author: ryan" >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Tags: " >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    printf "Slug: " >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "$${title}" | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Series: Remove if Not Needed"  >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md
    echo "Status: draft"  >> content/$$(echo $${category})/$$(echo $${title} | sed -e 's/[^[:alnum:]]/-/g' | tr -s '-' | tr A-Z a-z.md).md

This allows me to type make newpost and generate a new file for me to start my new post in!1

  1. When this post was originally published the slug command didn't account for making all of the text lower case. This was fixed in a subsequent commit ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Wed 02 February 2022

Auto Generating the Commit Message

In my first post of this series I outlined the steps needed in order for me to post. They are:

  1. Run make html to generate the SQLite database that powers my site's search tool1
  2. Run make vercel to deploy the SQLite database to vercel
  3. Run git add <filename> to add post to be committed to GitHub
  4. Run git commit -m <message> to commit to GitHub
  5. Post to Twitter with a link to my new post

In this post I'll be focusing on how I automated step 4, Run git commit -m <message> to commit to GitHub.

Automating the "git commit ..." part of my workflow

In order for my GitHub Action to auto post to Twitter, my commit message needs to be in the form of "New Post: ...". What I'm looking for is to be able to have the commit message be something like this:

New Post: Great New Post https://ryancheley.com/yyyy/mm/dd/great-new-post/

This is basically just three parts from the markdown file, the Title, the Date, and the Slug.

In order to get those details, I need to review the structure of the markdown file. For Pelican writing in markdown my file is structured like this:

Title:
Date:
Tags:
Slug:
Series:
Authors:
Status:

My words start here and go on for a bit.

In the last post I wrote about how to git add the files in the content directory. Here, I want to take the file that was added to git and get the first 7 rows, i.e. the details from Title to Status.

The file that was updated that needs to be added to git can be identified by running

find content -name '*.md' -print | sed 's/^/"/g' | sed 's/$/"/g' | xargs git add

Running git status now will display which file was added with the last command and you'll see something like this:

❯ git status
On branch main
Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        content/productivity/auto-generating-the-commit-message.md

What I need though is a more easily parsable output. Enter the porcelin flag which, per the docs

Give the output in an easy-to-parse format for scripts. This is similar to the short output, but will remain stable across Git versions and regardless of user configuration. See below for details.

which is exactly what I needed.

Running git status --porcelain you get this:

❯ git status --porcelain
?? content/productivity/more-writing-automation.md

Now, I just need to get the file path and exclude the status (the ?? above in this case2), which I can by piping in the results and using sed

❯ git status --porcelain | sed s/^...//
content/productivity/more-writing-automation.md

The sed portion says

  • search the output string starting at the beginning of the line (^)
  • find the first three characters (...). 3
  • replace them with nothing (//)

There are a couple of lines here that I need to get the content of for my commit message:

  • Title
  • Slug
  • Date
  • Status4

I can use head to get the first n lines of a file. In this case, I need the first 7 lines of the output from git status --porcelain | sed s/^...//. To do that, I pipe it to head!

git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7

That command will return this:

Title: Auto Generating the Commit Message
Date: 2022-01-24
Tags: Automation
Slug: auto-generating-the-commit-message
Series: Auto Deploying my Words
Authors: ryan
Status: draft

In order to get the Title, I'll pipe this output to grep to find the line with Title

git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Title: '

which will return this

Title: Auto Generating the Commit Message

Now I just need to remove the leading Title: and I've got the title I'm going to need for my Commit message!

git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Title: ' | sed -e 's/Title: //g'

which return just

Auto Generating the Commit Message

I do this for each of the parts I need:

  • Title
  • Slug
  • Date
  • Status

Now, this is getting to have a lot of parts, so I'm going to throw it into a bash script file called tweet.sh. The contents of the file look like this:

TITLE=`git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Title: ' | sed -e 's/Title: //g'`
SLUG=`git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Slug: ' | sed -e 's/Slug: //g'`
POST_DATE=`git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Date: ' | sed -e 's/Date: //g' | head -c 10 | grep '-' | sed -e 's/-/\//g'`
POST_STATUS=` git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Status: ' | sed -e 's/Status: //g'`

You'll see above that the Date piece is a little more complicated, but it's just doing a find and replace on the - to update them to / for the URL.

Now that I've got all of the pieces I need, it's time to start putting them together

I define a new variable called URL and set it

URL="https://ryancheley.com/$POST_DATE/$SLUG/"

and the commit message

MESSAGE="New Post: $TITLE $URL"

Now, all I need to do is wrap this in an if statement so the command only runs when the STATUS is published

if [ $POST_STATUS = "published" ]
then
    MESSAGE="New Post: $TITLE $URL"

    git commit -m "$MESSAGE"

    git push github main
fi

Putting this all together (including the git add from my previous post) and the tweet.sh file looks like this:

# Add the post to git
find content -name '*.md' -print | sed 's/^/"/g' | sed 's/$/"/g' | xargs git add


# Get the parts needed for the commit message
TITLE=`git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Title: ' | sed -e 's/Title: //g'`
SLUG=`git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Slug: ' | sed -e 's/Slug: //g'`
POST_DATE=`git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Date: ' | sed -e 's/Date: //g' | head -c 10 | grep '-' | sed -e 's/-/\//g'`
POST_STATUS=` git status --porcelain | sed s/^...// | xargs head -7 | grep 'Status: ' | sed -e 's/Status: //g'`

URL="https://ryancheley.com/$POST_DATE/$SLUG/"

if [ $POST_STATUS = "published" ]
then
    MESSAGE="New Post: $TITLE $URL"

    git commit -m "$MESSAGE"

    git push github main
fi

When this script is run it will find an updated or added markdown file (i.e. article) and add it to git. It will then parse the file to get data about the article. If the article is set to published it will commit the file with a message and will push to github. Once at GitHub, the Tweeting action I wrote about will tweet my commit message!

In the next (and last) article, I'm going to throw it all together and to get a spot when I can run one make command that will do all of this for me.

Caveats

The script above works, but if you have multiple articles that you're working on at the same time, it will fail pretty spectacularly. The final version of the script has guards against that and looks like this

  1. make vercel actually runs make html so this isn't really a step that I need to do. ↩︎
  2. Other values could just as easily be M or A ↩︎
  3. Why the first three characters, because that's how porcelain outputs the status ↩︎
  4. I will also need the Status to do some conditional logic otherwise I may have a post that is in draft status that I want to commit and the GitHub Action will run posting a tweet with an article and URL that don't actually exist yet. ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Fri 28 January 2022

Figuring out how Drafts REALLY works

On my way back from Arizona a few weeks ago I decided to play around with Drafts a bit. Now I use Drafts every day. When it went to a subscription model more than a year ago it was a no brainer for me. This is a seriously powerful app when you need it.

But since my initial workflows and shortcuts I've not really done too much with it. But after listening to some stuff from Tim Nahumck I decided I needed to invest a little time ... and honestly there's no better time than cruising at 25k feet on your way back from Phoenix.

Ok, first of all I never really understood workspaces. I had some set up but I didn't get it. That was the first place I started.

Each workspace can have its own action and keyboard shortcut thing which I didn't realize. This has so much potential. I can create workspaces for all sorts of things and have the keyboard shortcut things I need when I need them! This alone is mind blowing and I'm disappointed I didn't look into this feature sooner.

I have 4 workspaces set up:

  • OF Templates
  • O3
  • Scrum
  • post ideas

Initially since I didn't really understand the power of the workspace I had them mostly as filtering tools to be used when trying to find a draft. But now with the custom action and keyboards for each workspace I have them set up to filter down to specific tags AND use their own keyboards.

The OF Template workspace is used to create OmniFocus projects based on Taskpaper markup. There are a ton of different actions that I took from Rose Orchard (of Automators fame) that help to either add items with the correct syntax to a Task Paper markdown file OR turn the whole thing into an OmniFocus project. Simply a life saver for when I really know all of the steps that are going to be involved in a project and I want to write them all down!

The O3 workspace is used for processing the notes from the one-on-one I have with my team. There's really only two actions: Parse O3 notes and Add to O3 notes. How are these different? I have a Siri Shortcut that populates a Draft with a template that collects the name of the person and the date time that the O3 occurred. This is the note that is parsed by the first action. The second action is used when someone does something that I want to remember (either good or bad) so that I can bring it up at a more appropriate time (the best time to tell someone about a behavior is right now, but sometimes circumstances prevent that) so I have this little action.

In both cases they append data to a markdown file in Dropbox (i have one file per person that reports to me). The Shortcut also takes any actions that need to be completed and adds them to OmniFocus for me to review later.

The third workspace is Scrum. This workspace has just one action which is "Parse scrum notes". Again, I have a template that is generated from Siri Shortcuts and dropped into Drafts. During the morning standup meetings I have with my team this Draft will have the things I did yesterday, what I'm working on today, and any roadblocks that I have. It also create a section where I can add actions which when the draft is parsed goes into OmniFocus for me to review later (currently the items get added with a due date of today at 1pm ... but I need to revisit that).

The last workspace is post ideas (which is where I'm writing this from). Its custom keyboard is just a markdown one with quick ways to add markdown syntax and a Preview button so I can see what the markdown will render out as.

It's still a work in progress as this draft will end up in Ulysses so it can get posted to my site, but I've seen that I can even post from Drafts to Wordpress so I'm going to give that a shot later on.

There are several other ideas I have bouncing around in my head about ideas for potential workspaces. My only concern at this point is how many workspaces can I have before there are too many to be used effectively.

So glad I had the time on the flight to take a look at workspaces. A huge productivity boost for me!

Posted by ryan on Sun 05 May 2019

Creating Hastags for Social Media with a Drafts Action

Creating meaningful, long #hastags can be a pain in the butt.

There you are, writing up a witty tweet or making that perfect caption for your instagram pic and you realize that you have a fantastic idea for a hash tag that is more of a sentence than a single word.

You proceed to write it out and unleash your masterpiece to the world and just as you hit the submit button you notice that you have a typo, or the wrong spelling of a word and #ohcrap you need to delete and retweet!

That lead me to write a Drafts Action to take care of that.

I’ll leave others to write about the virtues of Drafts, but it’s fantastic.

The Action I created has two steps: (1) to run some JavaScript and (2) to copy the contents of the draft to the Clipboard. You can get my action here.

Here’s the JavaScript that I used to take a big long sentence and turn it into a social media worthy hashtag

var contents = draft.content;
var newContents = "#";


editor.setText(newContents+contents.replace(/ /g, "").toLowerCase());

Super simple, but holy crap does it help!

Posted by ryan on Sat 30 March 2019

Receipts

Every month I set up a budget for my family so that we can track our spending and save money in the ways that we need to while still being able to enjoy life.

I have a couple of Siri Shortcuts that will take a picture and then put that picture into a folder in Dropbox. The reason that I have a couple of them is that one is for physical receipts that we got at a store and the other is for online purchases. I’m sure that these couple be combined into one, but I haven’t done that yet.

One of the great things about these shortcuts is that they will create the folder that the image will go into if it’s not there. For example, the first receipt of March 2019 will create a folder called March in the 2019 folder. If the 2019 folder wasn’t there, it would have created it too.

What it doesn’t do is create the sub folder that all of my processed receipts will go into. Each month I need to create a folder called month_name Processed. And each month I think, there must be a way I can automate this, but because it doesn’t really take that long I’ve never really done it.

Over the weekend I finally had the time to try and write it up and test it out. Nothing too fancy, but it does what I want it to do, and a little more.

# create the variables I'm going to need later

y=$( date +"%Y" )
m=$( date +"%B" )
p=$( date +"%B_Processed" )

# check to see if the Year folder exists and if it doesn't, create it
if [ ! -d /Users/ryan/Dropbox/Family/Financials/$y ]; then
    mkdir /Users/ryan/Dropbox/Family/Financials/$y
fi

# check to see if the Month folder exists and if it doesn't, create it
if [ ! -d /Users/ryan/Dropbox/Family/Financials/$y/$m ]; then
    mkdir /Users/ryan/Dropbox/Family/Financials/$y/$m
fi

#check to see if the Month_Processed folder exists and if it doesn't, create it
if [ ! -d "/Users/ryan/Dropbox/Family/Financials/$y/$m/$p" ]; then
    mkdir "/Users/ryan/Dropbox/Family/Financials/$y/$m/$p"
fi

The last section I use the double quotes “” around the directory name so that I can have a space in the name of the processed folder. Initially I had used an underscore but that’s not how I do it in real life when creating the sub directors, so I had to do a bit of googling and found a helpful resource.

The only thing left to do at this point is get it set up to run automatically so I don’t have to do anything.

In order to do that I needed to add the following to my cronjob:

0 5 1 * * /Users/ryan/Documents/scripts/create_monthly_expense_folders.sh

And now I will have my folder structure created for me automatically on the first of the month at 5am!

Posted by ryan on Sat 16 March 2019

Monitoring the temperature of my Raspberry Pi Camera

In late April of this year I wrote a script that would capture the temperature of the Raspberry Pi that sits above my Hummingbird feeder and log it to a file.

It’s a straight forward enough script that captures the date, time and temperature as given by the internal measure_temp function. In code it looks like this:

MyDate="`date +'%m/%d/%Y, %H:%M, '`"
MyTemp="`/opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp |tr -d "=temp'C"`"
echo "$MyDate$MyTemp" >> /home/pi/Documents/python_projects/temperature/temp.log

I haven’t ever really done anything with the file, but one thing I wanted to do was to get alerted if (when) the temperature exceeded the recommended level of 70 C.

To do this I installed ssmtp onto my Pi using apt-get

sudo apt-get install ssmtp

With that installed I am able to send an email using the following command:

echo "This is the email body" | mail -s "This is the subject" user@domain.tld

With this tool in place I was able to attempt to send an alert if (when) the Pi’s temperature got above 70 C (the maximum recommended running temp).

At first, I tried adding this code:

if [ "$MyTemp" -gt "70" ]; then
   echo "Camera Pi Running Hot" | mail -s "Warning! The Camera Pi is Running Hot!!!" user@domain.tld
fi

Where the $MyTemp came from the above code that gets logged to the temp.log file.

It didn’t work. The problem is that the temperature I’m capturing for logging purposes is a float, while the item it was being compared to was an integer. No problem, I’ll just make the “70” into a “70.0” and that will fix the ... oh wait. That didn’t work either.

OK. I tried various combinations, trying to see what would work and finally determined that there is a way to get the temperature as an integer, but it meant using a different method to capture it. This is done by adding this line:

ComparisonTemp=$(($(cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp)/1000))

The code above gets the temperature as an integer. I then use that in my if statement for checking the temperature:

if [ "$ComparisonTemp" -gt "70" ]; then
   echo "Camera Pi Running Hot" | mail -s "Warning! The Camera Pi is Running Hot!!!" user@domain.tld
fi

Giving a final script that looks like this:

MyDate="`date +'%m/%d/%Y, %H:%M, '`"
MyTemp="`/opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp |tr -d "=temp'C"`"
echo "$MyDate$MyTemp" >> /home/pi/Documents/python_projects/temperature/temp.log
ComparisonTemp=$(($(cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp)/1000))

if [ "$ComparisonTemp" -gt "70" ]; then
   echo "Camera Pi Running Hot" | mail -s "Warning! The Camera Pi is Running Hot!!!" user@domain.tld
fi

Posted by ryan on Tue 04 December 2018

Using Drafts 5 at Work

I have many meetings that I go to in any given day. One of the things that I’d been struggling with was being able to keep track of what I needed to do after a meeting and/or documenting certain types of meetings more effectively.

I have been using a Workflow I created a couple of years ago to get the pertinent details of a meeting into Drafts. I spoke about updating that workflow to incorporate drafts 5 here.

Once I was able to get the information into Drafts 5 a new opportunity arose. I was able to run a Workflow in Drafts!

I decided that getting the information into Drafts was great, but I needed a good way to get it out.

There were two sections in the Draft that I decided I could leverage to help:

  1. Actions
  2. Notes

Broadly speaking there are 3 types of meetings I go to:

  1. Daily Standup aka Scrum
  2. One-on-One with direct reports or my manager
  3. General Meetings

Categorizing the meetings helped me to create Draft Actions that run Workflows for each meeting type.

Scrum

This workflow runs through the Actions of the Draft and adds each one to OmniFocus in a Project called Scrum with a Tag of Work. The due date set for these tasks is noon of the same day. My goal is to have the items that come from Scrum totally processed by noon of that day and for 80% of them I can. Some actions are more involved, but having them in OmniFocus helps me to make sure that they get taken care of.

It also creates a calendar meeting for the next business day with my Scrum template and lets me know which team member will start that next day.

One-on-One

This workflow runs similarly to the Scrum workflow. It adds the Action items to OmniFocus with a due date of noon the same day, tagged with Work and in the One-on-One Project.

Instead of creating a calendar meeting for the next business day at 8:30 it appends items from the Notes section to a Dropbox file. The Dropbox path is predefined, but the name of the file matches the name of the person I met with (luckily I don’t have 2 Tom’s reporting to me).

General Meetings

This is the simplest workflow. It adds all of the items under actions to OmniFocus with a due date of noon, project of Meeting Follow Up and Tag of Work.

After the Actions are run from Drafts the notes are archived in Drafts.

I’m toying with the idea of archiving the notes from these meetings into Dropbox, but I’m not sure that it gets me anything ... so I haven’t really looked at it too deeply.

Workflow links

The links for each of the workflows can be found here:

Parse Scrum Notes

Parse One-on-One Notes

Parse Meeting Notes

Posted by ryan on Thu 07 June 2018

Using Drafts 5 at Work

I have many meetings that I go to in any given day. One of the things that I’d been struggling with was being able to keep track of what I needed to do after a meeting and/or documenting certain types of meetings more effectively.

I have been using a Workflow I created a couple of years ago to get the pertinent details of a meeting into Drafts. I spoke about updating that workflow to incorporate drafts 5 here.

Once I was able to get the information into Drafts 5 a new opportunity arose. I was able to run a Workflow in Drafts!

I decided that getting the information into Drafts was great, but I needed a good way to get it out.

There were two sections in the Draft that I decided I could leverage to help:

  1. Actions
  2. Notes

Broadly speaking there are 3 types of meetings I go to:

  1. Daily Standup aka Scrum
  2. One-on-One with direct reports or my manager
  3. General Meetings

Categorizing the meetings helped me to create Draft Actions that run Workflows for each meeting type.

Scrum

This workflow runs through the Actions of the Draft and adds each one to OmniFocus in a Project called Scrum with a Tag of Work. The due date set for these tasks is noon of the same day. My goal is to have the items that come from Scrum totally processed by noon of that day and for 80% of them I can. Some actions are more involved, but having them in OmniFocus helps me to make sure that they get taken care of.

It also creates a calendar meeting for the next business day with my Scrum template and lets me know which team member will start that next day.

One-on-One

This workflow runs similarly to the Scrum workflow. It adds the Action items to OmniFocus with a due date of noon the same day, tagged with Work and in the One-on-One Project.

Instead of creating a calendar meeting for the next business day at 8:30 it appends items from the Notes section to a Dropbox file. The Dropbox path is predefined, but the name of the file matches the name of the person I met with (luckily I don’t have 2 Tom’s reporting to me).

General Meetings

This is the simplest workflow. It adds all of the items under actions to OmniFocus with a due date of noon, project of Meeting Follow Up and Tag of Work.

After the Actions are run from Drafts the notes are archived in Drafts.

I’m toying with the idea of archiving the notes from these meetings into Dropbox, but I’m not sure that it gets me anything ... so I haven’t really looked at it too deeply.

Workflow links

The links for each of the workflows can be found here:

Parse Scrum Notes

Parse One-on-One Notes

Parse Meeting Notes

Posted by ryan on Thu 07 June 2018

Updating my meeting Workflow for Drafts 5

Drafts is a productivity app created by Greg Pierce (\@AgileTortoise).

I’ve loved and used Drafts 4 every day for the last several years. I loved it so much I even contributed to the Tip Jar Greg had in the app. Seriously, it’s an amazing app. If you haven’t downloaded it already you totally should.

Recently, Greg released Drafts 5. With this new version comes a new Business Model as well. Instead of a single pay (and hope people ‘tip’ you) he’s converted to a subscription model.

I signed up for the free week and didn’t have a real opportunity to use it before my free week was converted into a pay week but I’ve no regrets. I like what Greg does and want him to keep updating his app so that I can get the benefits of it once I have a real chance to dive in.

Part of the reason I wasn’t able to really use the new version is the way that I primarily use Drafts. I have a WorkFlow that takes a meeting on my work calendar and allows me to take notes about that meetings.

It’s one of the most useful productivity tools I have during my morning standup meetings with my team, and it’s useful for the other (sometimes endless) meetings that I go to.

With the release of Drafts 5 I was not longer able to use both Drafts 5 AND my workflow, so I needed to update my workflow.

With Drafts 4 it was just one of the built in Apps. Because Drafts 5 limits some of the functionality unless you have the PRO version I don’t think that Workflow will be updated to include Drafts 5 like it did Drafts 4.

Once I realized that AND since I’m paying for the app I figured I’d need to update my Workflow instead of waiting and hoping that Workflow would be updated to include Drafts 5.

In order to make the update I had to look for URL Scheme for Drafts 5 ... but I couldn’t really find one. I assumed that Drafts 5 URL Scheme would be the same as Drafts 4 (I was right) and made various attempts at getting a copy of the Workflow to work with Drafts 5.

This is the section of the workflow that needs to be updated:

workflow to update

Since Drafts 5 isn’t included in the Built in Apps I was going to need to pass a URL and open the app.

This would require 3 separate steps in Workflow

  1. Convert Text into URL Encoded string
  2. Prepend the URL Scheme for creating a new draft to the URL Encoded String
  3. Open the URL

updated workflow

This basically means that 1 step is now replaced with 3 ... but hey, that’s the price of progress must be paid!

Both the Drafts 4 and Drafts 5 versions of these workflows are available.

If you enjoy them, hit me up in the comments or let me know on Twitter \@ryancheley!

Posted by ryan on Sat 19 May 2018

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