Sunday, March 17, 2024

Last week I found myself, briefly, at a point where I felt like I was done thinking about taking notes and the processes and tools I use to do so. It didn't last. Since then I've cycled dizzyingly through my usual carousel of apps, and it's crazy-making. Today I woke up and my first thought was, "Oh right, I'm back in Tinderbox again." What will I wake up to tomorrow?

I was looking for a post I knew I'd written, and finally found it on Medium. I don't know why I'd never moved it somewhere else, and this bugged me, so I started downloading posts one-by-one. I only have around 150 posts on Medium, but that's still a lot of work. Turns out I could export my entire Medium account using an option in the Medium control panel, so I did. The only drawback is that image links in the downloaded files reference the Medium CDN, meaning they are not complete archives. I'll probably still manually download my favorites, using the terrific SingleFile extension, so the archives are completely self-contained HTML documents with no external dependencies.

One point of friction when blogging with static site generators is getting images where they belong. I did something about it this morning in Tinderbox.

Each post already has an Image attribute for setting the path to the post's image. What I've added is a Stamp to copy a file from wherever it is into the correct directory in my site's folder. At the same time, it sets the Image path for me.

All I need to do is drag an image from the Finder into the File attribute of a post, run the Stamp, and I'm done. Here's the action code I used in the "Import Post Image" Stamp.

All it does is process some strings to create paths and calls out to the terminal 'cp' command, then sets some of the note's attributes. I'm sure I'll improve this over time, but this has already smoothed the way to adding images to posts here.