3:27a.m. Fun With Automator

I have been fiddling a bit with Automator and have written a couple of mini applications. They are highly specialized (I have no idea if they would help anyone other than me).

The first one is for those who use Del.icio.us. It backs up your del.icio.us bookmarks to text file on your hard drive, which is useful if you depend on your bookmarks. If for some reason del.icio.us should go down or disappear (very unlikely), you’ll have all of your links which you could access on a different bookmarking system, such as Scuttle. The backup app will run every couple of days in the background. Yes, I know it’s odd that I’ve thought this whole thing through.

Backpack is a great service, but it’s still missing a few features in my opinion. It does not give the option to use Markdown or any real way to use your pages off your computer, lets say, in your personal organizer.

I have been thinking about trying out the Hipster PDA, but it seemed useless if I was already using Backpack as my PIM. Who wants to write out what they have already typed out? So, I tried to combine the two…

Essentially I made an Automator app that takes the most recent Backpack email you’ve received in Mail and turns it into an Hipster PDA-printable Microsoft Word document. So, you email yourself the Backpack page that you want to add to your Hipster PDA, run the action, and then just print the newly created Word document on an index card.

I think I’ll post at least the del.icio.us back up automator action in the extras in a little bit.

Off to school. I’m a bit scared of my huge scary monster Physiological Psychology test that I have this afternoon. I get to look over maybe a hundred flash cards over and over again until four o’ clock. Wish me luck!