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

Converting Writing Examples from doc to markdown: My Process

All of my writing examples were written while attending the University of Arizona when I was studying Economics.

These writing examples are from 2004 and were written in either Microsoft Word OR the OpenOffice Writer

Before getting the files onto Github I wanted to convert them into markdown so that they would be in plain text.

I did this mostly as an exercise to see if I could, but in going through it I'm glad I did. Since the files were written in .doc format, and the .doc format has been replaced with the .docx format it could be that at some point my work would be inaccessible. Now, I don't have to worry about that.

So, how did I get from a .doc file written in 2004 to a converted markdown file created in 2016? Here's how:

Round 1

1. Downloaded the Doc files from my Google Drive to my local Desktop and saved them into a folder called Summaries
2. Each week of work had it's own directory, so I had to go into each directory individually (not sure how to do recursive work yet)
3. Each of the files was written in 2004 so I had to change the file types from .doc to .docx. This was accomplished with this command: textutil -convert docx *.doc
4. Once the files were converted from .doc to .docx I ran the following commands:
   1. cd ../yyyymmdd where yyyy = YEAR, mm = Month in 2 digits; dd = day in 2 digits
   2. for f in *\ *; do mv "$f" "${f// /_}"; done \^1- this would replace the space character with an underscore. this was needed so I could run the next command
   3. for file in $(ls *.docx); do pandoc -s -S "${file}" -o "${file%docx}md"; done \^2 - this uses pandoc to convert the docx file into valid markdown files
   4. mv *.md ../ - used to move the .md files into the next directory up
5. With that done I just needed to move the files from my Summaries directory to my writing-examples github repo. I'm using the GUI for this so I have a folder on my desktop called writing-examples. To move them I just used mv Summaries/*.md writing-examples/

So that's it. Nothing too fancy, but I wanted to write it down so I can look back on it later and know what the heck I did.

Round 2

The problem I'm finding is that the bulk conversion using textutil isn't keeping the footnotes from the original .doc file. These are important though, as they reference the original work. Ugh!

Used this command \^5 to recursively replace the spaces in the files names with underscores:

find . -depth -name '* *' \ | while IFS= read -r f ; do mv -i "$f" "$(dirname "$f")/$(basename "$f"|tr ' ' _)" ; done

Used this command \^3 to convert all of the .doc to .docx at the same time

find . -name *.doc -exec textutil -convert docx '{}' \;

Used this command \^4 to generate the markdown files recursively:

find . -name "*.docx" | while read i; do pandoc -f docx -t markdown "$i" -o "${i%.*}.md"; done;

Used this command to move the markdown files:

Never figured out what to do here :(

Round 3

OK, I just gave up on using textutil for the conversion. It wasn't keeping the footnotes on the conversion from .doc to .docx.

Instead I used the Google Drive add in Converter for Google Drive Document. It converted the .doc to .docx AND kept the footnotes like I wanted it to.

Of course, it output all of the files to the same directory, so the work I did to get the recursion to work previously can't be applied here sigh

Now, the only commands to run from the terminal are the following:

1. `for f in *\ *; do mv "$f" "${f// /_}"; done` [^1]- this would replace the space character with an underscore. this was needed so I could run the next command
2. `for file in $(ls *.docx); do pandoc -s -S "${file}" -o "${file%docx}md"; done` [^2] - this uses pandoc to convert the docx file into valid markdown files
3. `mv *.md <directory/path>`

Round 4

Like any ~~good~~ ~~bad~~ lazy programmer I've opted for a brute force method of converting the doc files to docx files. I opened each one in Word on macOS and saved as docx. Problem solved ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Step 1: used the command I found here \^7 to recursively replace the spaces in the files names with underscores _

find . -depth -name '* *' \ | while IFS= read -r f ; do mv -i "$f" "$(dirname "$f")/$(basename "$f"|tr ' ' _)" ; done

Step 2: Use the command found here \^6 to generate the markdown files recursively:

find . -name "*.docx" | while read i; do pandoc -f docx -t markdown "$i" -o "${i%.*}.md"; done;

Step 3: Add the files to my GitHub repo graduate-writing-examples

For this I used the GitHub macOS Desktop App to create a repo in my Documents directory, so it lives in ~/Documents/graduate-writing-examples/

I then used the finder to locate all of the md files in the Summaries folder and then dragged them into the repo. There were 2 files with the same name Rose_Summary and Libecap_and_Johnson_Summary. While I'm sure that I could have figured out how to accomplish this with the command line, this took less than 1 minute, and I had just spent 5 minutes trying to find a terminal command to do it. Again, the lazy programmer wins.

Once the files were in the local repo I committed the files and boom they were in my GitHub Writing Examples repo.

Posted by ryan on Fri 07 October 2016