December 2022

Jan 08, 2023

Another year draws to a close and it has been a bit quieter for me than in previous months. As I noted last month, I have some personal things I’m dealing with of late that have required my attention. As a result, December has been limited in terms of my time to create things. I did manage to fit in a few coffee shop trips while staying at my in-laws between Christmas and New Year, so I did manage to put out a few blog posts at least. As a result, this round up is probably going to be quite a relatively quick one.

ThoughtAsylum

The first couple of posts that I put out in December were related to getting information into Obsidian. The first of the posts covered a couple of options (URL scheme-based and file-based) using Apple Shortcuts. I then followed up with a similar post, but this time focused on the same approaches, but utilising Drafts (Drafts could of course utilise Shortcuts to do this, but this would slow things down - which isn’t what you want for capture).

The third post I managed to publish was about both Apple Shortcuts and Drafts. The standard Shortcuts action step in Drafts switches the current application from Drafts to Shortcuts and back, but in the post I cover another approach that can be utilised on the Mac to stay in Drafts.

Podcasts

Nothing I’ve done seems to have come up in conversation on any of my usual podcasts in the past month, but in browsing through my backlog of podcasts in Overcast I was surprised to discover that I’ve actually had a couple of passing and very positive mentions in Do By Friday episodes this year, which was truly wonderful to come across.

Forums

My forum time has been a little limited in December, but I think in general there felt like fewer posts being pushed out on my usual forum haunts.

Drafts

The Drafts forums were relatively busy in December, but I didn’t manage to spend a great deal of time responding to queries.

Automators

The Automators forum was uncharacteristically quiet in December, and while I generally didn’t engage all that much on the forum, the same is probably true of everyone.

Other

Since Obsidian is a daily driver app for me on multiple platforms, I try and keep abreast of what’s going on in the space by lurking on the Obsidian forum, and reading the wonderful Obsidian Roundup. I had a nice surprise just before Christmas to see that one of my blog posts from last month got a mention in the 17 December Roundup posting.

I managed a few trips to one of the coffee shops near my in-laws over the festive period, and this gave me a bit of an opportunity to sort out a few Obsidian related tasks.

The first was just sorting out some filing that had been malingering since starting my new job. The high level structures were there, but I needed to catch up on some of the next level down structuring to get things in the place where I wanted them to be. But that went pretty well, and I created several new Templater templates and revised many existing ones. They should save me a lot of time in the future.

The second was that I’ve started working on a few things to help me with my Obsidian use on the Mac, utilising Alfred. I know that there are some Alfred workflows for Obsidian out there, but I’m working on approaches for things that I want to do that don’t require additional Obsidian plugins to be installed and activated in Obsidian. Once I have enough working functionality in the workflow, and I'm happy with how it's working, I’ll release it, but I expect this will take me a while to get to the point where I’m happy to do that.

However, if you are interested in automating with Obsidian and experimenting with plugins, I’m going to recommend taking a look at the Obsidian Actions URI plugin. This has been developed primarily for the Actions for Obsidian Shortcuts helper app that is currently in beta, but being based around extending the Obsidian URL scheme, you can utilise the plugin anywhere you can launch a URL.

The Alfred Gallery for workflows is now in early access. I make it there there are almost 100 workflows now available in the gallery, but to date, all of my workflows remain “in progress” on the submission sub-forum. I’ve had semi-regular contact from the Running with Crayons team, so I assume that they will be included at some point, but I guess they’ve been tackling a lot of the simpler workflows first to get the gallery bulked out.

Upcoming

I’m expecting to be doing a bit of travelling for personal reasons over the next few months, so this is either going to give me more time to create stuff, or less. I’m not sure yet. but, I’m going to continue getting content out, looking at the Alfred/Obsidian workflow, and probably revisiting some existing projects - the Thoughtasylum Action Groups for Drafts haven’t received any notable updates for quite some time, so I would like to set aside some time for that in particular.

I haven’t put any videos up on my tutorials site for a little while, and I do need to carve out some time for that. What I need though is time at home to do the recording - my workflow relies on some desk bound hardware.

Thank to everyone for your support over the last year, and here’s to 2023 and all the coffee fuelled productivity I may find in it.


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