HackMake

My workflow for writing link posts is rooted in Reeder and Instapaper on iPad. After reading the posts, I want to be able to get them into a draft as easily as possible. What I wanted to avoid was having to copy and paste links and quotes, opening up a text editor, making a new file, and pasting everything in.

I originally set up an IFTTT recipe that took newly pinned items with a specific tag and created a new text file with information that I passed along to it. There were a few downsides to this. I couldn’t make the filename the slug I wanted, so I had to edit it manually after. I often forgot to do this which caused some 404s when I posted shoddy URLs. The other thing with IFTTT was that it only checked my pins and created drafts once every 15 minutes or so. If I wanted to pin something and then quickly switch over to Byword to edit and post, I was out of luck.

So, I made this thing that works much better. It’s a PHP script that runs continuously, checking for new pins on my Pinboard account and creates drafts when new pins with the specified tag are created. The outputted format is perfect, it makes a slug out of the title I give the pin, and best of all, within a second or two, my draft is in Dropbox.

Here’s my flow now:

1. Find a post on Twitter or RSS and send it to Instapaper for further reading. 2) Read the post and look for a pull quote. 3) Select the text I want to quote and in Instapaper, hit Share. 4) Hit Post to Pinboard 5) Clean up the title, add the tag if it’s not already there and, insert a > to block quote the text. 6) Hit Post and within seconds there’s a perfectly formatted draft waiting for me to review and publish.