For me, September flew by and was a bit of a non-stop month for me. I usually get quite a good chunk of my personal projects done on Saturdays, but this past month I've had a lot of family and personal things booked in on Saturdays which dramatically curtailed my usual personal project productivity. But sometimes, that's the way things go, and I'm sure I'll have other times where I can squeeze in more.
ThoughtAsylum
I managed to get one post out mid-month on something I finally managed to get figured out in Obsidian.
Obsidian's daily notes are something I use, well daily, and I have a workspace in one of my vaults that I use as my starting point and like to load my daily note into as a reset point throughout the day. The issue is that you can't set a workspace to dynamically load a note like today's daily note.
But with the aid of a few plugins, I managed to come up with a way to load the workspace, load in today's note, and also do a little bit of set up within the note once loaded.
It is quite involved, but it says me some finger-fu of typing a sequence of several keyboard combos.
Now you may ask, why not use something like AutoHotKey or Keyboard Maestro to just do the finger-fu? Well this approach keeps everything in Obsidian and it works cross-platform which overall minimises maintenance.
I think even in its own right it makes for an interesting read about automation as you can see how I've taken several automation tools (Obsidian community plugins) and chained them together to achieve the desired result.
Forums
I've managed to get some time in on a few forums during the month.
Over on the Drafts forum, I posted a several times on TextExpander Snippets within Drafts Action Templates. I think it might be a generally interesting discussion, and I really do think I should write a blog post about posting good questions/request for help. So much time is lost to the typical IT support back and forth of asking questions about things that could have been stated up front. But, that's not the interesting part. The interesting part was I had a theory about how to do what the poster (@bocciaman) wanted to with TextExpander on the Mac. But it turns out I couldn't progress it. Smile, who create TextExpander apparently have not been doing their regression testing and had removed some AppleScript functionality. I seem to be the first person to have reported it, which shows how often people were using it, but I think that reveals an underlying issue in their deployment process. They have agreed to consider re-adding the functionality, but I guess if I'm the minority of one, the chances of them assigning resources to restore the removed functionality might be limited. But, given that they do still support AppleScript and have the code to do it, I'm intrigued as to why it wasn't just a slam dunk to add the functionality back that they have presumably accidentally removed - i.e. it was not deprecated?
On the Automators forum, I posted a follow up to episode 84 (Rosemary & David talk to @chris_lawley) linking to some information about running PowerShell on the Mac (and yes I do occasionally use PowerShell on the Mac), and about some advanced linking stuff in Drafts, courtesy of my ThoughtAsylum Drafts Action groups.
Behind the Scenes
I have a few more short posts on Obsidian and Drafts in the offing, but that are currently only sets of notes rather than even draft posts.
Greg (@agiletortoise) has fixed an AppleScript bug I came across in Drafts, so some of the Mac-only functionality I've been looking at adding to My Drafts library and action groups are back on the cards.
I have also been working with on a new theme and syntax to use with Drafts. It is just a personal extension to Markdown. Nothing revolutionary, and others have created similar ones when the functionality was launched. But, I expect I will share it even if it is just as another example for people to build their own from. The only thing I need to consider is if I want to wait until after some of the new stuff Greg is working on in the latest Drafts beta is released and can be included?
Upcoming
I'm still busy with studying for courses related to the day job, and in fact the day job is super busy right now. But I think most of my October Saturdays are relatively unencumbered by other aspects of my life, so I'm sure I'll get a few things cranked out.
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The 5 AM Saturday starts somehow seem to be getting darker each week, but the peace and quiet is giving me some valuable focus time for all these personal projects I seem to accumulate.
Thank you once again to all those who have donated to buy me a coffee.