vanderwal.net

Links Weren't Linking

For more than a decade I have had a Python link checker I occasionally run against my Links :: vanderwal.net page. I regularly update the links page and the additions are manual inserts and reposting the page when I find something I’m regularly going back to, or want to go back to. About 18 months back my long used python script using Beautiful Soup (HTML parser) - Wikipedia needed updating the BeautifulSoup package and tweaking the script a little bit.

Over these last 18 months the bot / scraper / AI crawler wars have become a hot mess and running a link checker script, unknowingly was getting blocked by hosts / servers that are working to not get slammed by the orders of magnitude of increased traffic from non-organic sources. One method (among many) server owners deplay is blocking access to websites from requests with no user agent or an old user agent claim (as this is what a lot of the aggressive inorganic traffic uses). My old school link checker feels like a web version of Wall-E going around and checking to clean up my broken links and getting caught in the wake from large AI industrial retrieval ships.

Thursday I wanted to run my link checker and realized it wasn’t going to be all that helpful. I thought a quick edit of the script to add a more current user agent to the what is presented to the link’s server would help. I went with: “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 ” “(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.0 Safari/605.1.15”. This one minor change when running the link checker removed about 200 false positive broken links.

There are How Many Links?

With many things I have run and been doing for ages, my estimation of how much or how many of something is wildly off. Another minor tweak I made was to list the number of links tested on my Links :: vanderwal.net page. I have had a links page for two or three years longer than I have had a web domain. I set up this domain in 1997 and the site started with a homepage and a links page of things I wanted near in reach. My first link check I made on Thursday I had 943 links. Well, that was about double of my rough estimate.

Updating to Get Better Data

When I last updated the Python script to a new version of BeautifulSoup I didn’t really change much else. Now that things were less than optimal I noticed my Python script just used a default check, but wasn’t using GET. Adding GET would provide feedback as to the type of HTTP response codes I was getting and that would help reduce my manual checks of the list of “broken links”.

A quick test after adding GET had more updates and parsing needed. If I’m getting the actual responses back, I want to log the returned codes and information, but I really want that organized. The initial output of the checking is a long list of links with non–200 status with their state, the link, error code, if a redirect it tried the redirect and if a 200 it shows the “200” and the new link.

The initial output from running BeautifulSoup is the list in a temporary text document. The last part of the script runs through the text document and turns that list into a grouped list and table markdown file in my Notes directory that Obsidian watches over.

Structured Documents Made the Next Steps Easier

The structured Markdown note has sub-headings for the different returned link states. This works like a really good triage list. I could easily double-check the links marked as broken (404, 409, 500, and no DNS) in the table and added another column to the table for the checked status I provided. I had 52 of these and I went through them in about 15 minutes.

I made a back-up of the links page and verified git was current so I could rollback. I handed off the update to Claude Code to follow my notation of the section I just checked, my structured outcome note, and to follow one of the four processes I posted. It made the updates in seconds and I ran diff against the two files and the outcome was perfect.

I moved the outcome page to production and ran a commit. I ran the Python checker again and tackled a couple of small sections in the same manner. On my 3rd running of the checker I looked at the roughly 430 redirections captured. Since Claude had managed the two prior updates perfectly I had it handle the redirection updates. This too was processed quickly and the output links page was perfect on the manual check. But Claude Code running Opus 5.5 had additional notes from the update that included some redirects were not similar to the page historically that I linked to (in some cases the domain had changed hands years ago and Claude derived context from surrounding links that it was no longer a fit), noted that sites had changed languages, sites were now ads from domain resellers, and more. It had a list of links that could now be problematic. I wasn’t expecting this additional feedback and the feedback I checked was spot on and insanely helpful.

I ran the Python link checker a fourth time and I was down to 916 links on the page. Broken links gone, with many of my “archive” links gone too, which are the gray links as the linked site went from not being updated in years to now fully gone from the living internet. I have left things with this fourth pass of the checker on my to-do list. The links that are large sites with large organizations behind them are in the blocked connection or have “are you human” test in front of them, but still function. I have about 70 or so links that I need to manually go through and log what to do. Some no longer have the content I have long pointed to.

Outcomes

I’m happy with where the Python link checker ended up. The web is a lot more fragile than it seems like it ever was. I was surprised how many links had redirects (I have 50 that still need manual reviews). While I’m bummed many “archive” links are not on the page they were gone and they could be let go.

The two sections on the links page that took the biggest hit are the tech section and the “Urban Planning and Cities” section. Finding sites that fit the urban planning and cities perspective have always been tough to find. Losing some means I need to dig again.

Rearranging Automations and Aggregations

This week and the prior had a spattering of updates and reworking of some of my regular automations and aggregations.

I’ve posted about my automation patterns with scripts (mostly python), some AI (sometimes Claude), many web scripts and web services (IFTTT and a few others), many local scripts and triggers that one action for an intended purpose also pushes things to additional places (for aggregation, organization, and later retrieval), other patterns. I’ve written about some of this recently: My Automations Over the Ages and Today’s View and Adjusting Daily Aggregation for Less Friction.

I’ve long played with data to sort out what is in it, the shape of it, and possibilities in it (going back to before grad school – it was a large part of my second job out of undergrad and grad school expanded and honed it). This continues today with different tools and services. The ability to quickly build a proof of concept for data analytics and munge the data to get a helpful data visualization is something I’ve liked from AI services like Claude. I can test a workflow, set up a quick process for making use of the data and information I normally tuck away. Most often I’ll try something and if it works well I will modify it and move it out of Claude and into a python script (or set of python-based processes) to get a usable output I can gain insight from and/or work with. On occasion the data is not steady enough, so I will keep things in Claude and run scheduled automation to do the grunt work so that I have my aggregations in my Daily Dump markdown note I keep in my notes folder Obsidian looks over, and it is ready early in the morning for me to sort out what I continue with, what is fine, and what I need to process in some way.

Nearly all of my morning aggregations and automations are dealing with local (on my device(s)) data, information, and objects. I don’t want this going into anybody else’s service or cloud as it is foolish and pointless to do this. This is my Personal InfoCloud (see Overview of the InfoClouds – Personal InfoCloud) and it remains there not drifts out.

Claude Cowork Shift Local Scheduled Automations

A little less than a third of my morning automations and aggregations have run through a local Claude Cowork Scheduler. Anthropic announced it was not going to allow the creation of new Cowork Scheduled tasks and new ones (possibly modifications too) would need to move to the cloud. Uh… no! The options were to move fully to Python and/or other scripted workflows, move off of Claude, or move the scheduled tasks out of Cowork to Claude Code. I also had a few morning automation and aggregation tasks I kick off manually as they are based on me finishing my personal tasks.

Manually Mapping Out Flows in Obsidian Canvas Helps

A little more than a year ago I mapped out my morning and weekly workflow automations and aggregations with the services, scripts, tasks, time triggers, schedulers, and regular manually triggered tasks, automations, and aggregations. I mapped this rather quickly in Obsidian’s Canvas Obsidian Canvas that is helpful for seeing groupings, related processes through links, and flows. I went through my grouped tasks that I automated and marked the ones I needed to deal with using a yellow dot emoji. There were a few nested ones I hadn’t considered. (A great thing with Canvas is having a link to my notes in the automation node so I can quickly jump to see details.)

I have long used Claude Code for debugging code and suggesting optimizations to code (sometimes the suggestions are good and quite helpful, I moved to it after deep frustration with ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot poor output). Moving things to Code was relatively straight forward (it didn’t have the battles with time that were prevalent in Cowork, which was really frustrating until I sorted out a workaround so Cowork could understand “today”, “yesterday”, “past 24 hours”, etc – working with time can be problematic, but it mangled things that are relatively straight forward).

Move from Claude to Python Driven App, Triggered by Apple Shortcuts

I went to convert one of my manually triggered automations and realized it didn’t need to be in Claude at all, and was a good candidate to move python, but I would need to build a Slack app / bot to pull from my personal Slack instance. About 5 to 10 years ago building a Slack app was rather a common and straightforward endeavour. That changed a bit and the setup screens did too. Slack is now AI bot-friendly first and I’m not building an AI bot, but going in the opposite direction (I had used the MCP from Slack to run the aggregation prior). Rather than 15 to 30 minutes creating the Slack app it took around 90 minutes to deal with the changes in Slack. But, I also wanted an easier way to trigger the Slack app to run and capture the links to videos I had found interesting, and put them in a list in a markdown file, so I could take the next steps. I ended up using Apple Shortcut to trigger the Python script. The automation now is done in under a second rather than just under two minutes and no files uploaded anywhere.

I have two other automations I manually trigger that I can likely move to Python in the same manner using secure APIs and triggering them from Apple Shortcuts. I haven’t converted them yet.

The Shift to Code Started a Few Months Ago

In the past few months I moved a few of my Claude tasks I run for clean up of transcripts from Cowork to Code and found a large reduction in time, tokens, and Claude usage in that move. The quality of the shift has been better quality, output is more consistent, and also calls out potential issues on transcription clean-up (I pull podcast and YouTube transcripts which are riddled with errors and poorly structured, I don’t change the content but have proper sentence and paragraph structures, but also included some sub-headers). Some of the data conversion tasks and modifying script tasks that I would run or plan out in Chat or Cowork all moved to Code and the quality improved and token / usage all noticeably improved. The usage and quality improved when I started using Opus 5.5, with Sonar I had a lot of rework and Claude off and running changing things that were reviews not to change things. My token and usage decrementing is about a third less or better with Code and Opus 5.5, which doesn’t fully make sense.

The last push was moving my Daily Dump related aggregations and automations and the Weekly round-up out of Cowork as everything done is local with those tasks. The move from Cowork to Code was rather straightforward. I asked Claude Code to guide setting up the needed resource access it would need for its own processing and assistance setting up the Routines and its timing (Code’s routine timers aren’t precise and I wanted them running at the exact open times with locked windows I regularly run things within). That timing took had pushback from Claude but got it close to the window and then it took me understanding Code Routines have some odd buffers of a few minutes.

How it is Going

This took a chunk of time early in the week, but things are running fine. All but a couple of manually triggered tasks are now green check emoji and not yellow dots. Tomorrow morning when my Weekly roundup runs will be a big question and test.

The biggest friction points are the pieces I’ve moved to new homes and remembering where they get triggered. The upside with using Apple Shortcuts is that it can be organized rather well to keep things related together. I moved a lot of my local web servers that enable data visualization web apps to Apple Shortcut triggers while setting up other Shortcuts and that has helped the efficiency of those processes.

Adjusting Daily Aggregation for Less Friction

Sunday I hit a point where my daily automations (which I layout in part here - My Automations Over the Ages and Today’s View in my morning process and weekly process) and placing the outputs into my Daily Dump note sections was really making for a lot of friction in my note taking / note making. Additionally, it was breaking focus and holding my concentration on what I was trying to capture in my note’s sections.

How Daily Dump Notes are Setup

My Daily Dump has 14 sections: Plans, Thoughts, Review, Read, Talked With, Listened, Watched, Productivity, Worked, Learned, Played, Ate, Health, Bought, and Added to a wishlist.

The intent with the subheads in my note is to quickly jump to the section as I run across something or am thinking through and idea or concept and capture the thoughts or what I consumed and ideas from it, so I can get back to it later in my notes. But, since this is markdown and in Obsidian I can take the notes with its subheading and text, extract it, and then transclude it (move it out and link it back in to show it in another note). But, having each day’s note relatively clean (the exception is the Plans section for things brewing and on the front burner to do are moved from the prior day’s note to the current day’s with a python script that keeps the completed tasks on the prior day and removes things not completed and moved them to today).

Friction from Adding Aggregation to the Sections

The daily aggregations pulled in things captured from various reading and copying or favoriting tasks that get automatically captured in Instapaper and Pinboard, as well as all the files I created and modified. I also have notes from Drafts that I capture on the go and tagged to get pulled in aggregated, as well as a list of things I watched online that I want to track, but also list of videos watched where I’ve captured the transcript in Readwise I may want to review (and likely do a further clean-up step).

All of this was getting aggregated into collective notes by type and transcluded into the relevant groups in my Daily Dump note. This added a lot of friction to the intent of my Daily Dump for quick easy drop into a section and capture a note and then after sort out how I may handle it. Add to this, Sunday my Weekly Review runs and captures all of this from the week and compiles it into one note so with a heat map at the top so I can review it to see what I’ve been doing and find things to cut back on or put focus on for the upcoming week. The Weekly Review was transcluded into Productivity, which is ironic as all of this adding of aggregation transclusions was making me really unproductive.

The Fix to Bring Back Focus and Quick Capture

On Sunday I had enough of the friction and took time to sort out a solution. I liked the capture and the ability to scan through and find things I need to continue working on or make a change on, but having it in my quick capture notes area made it tough.

I added a “Review” section just under Plans and now all aggregations and transclusions go there. The best part is when I’m not reviewing it, a heading in Obsidian can be collapsed, which gives me focus on everything else.

On Sunday I did a quick manual restructuring of my note by putting everything aggregated into the Review section and then collapsed it. This was a magical focus trick.

Updating the Python Script that Automates Transclusion

Sunday I did the first edit of the python script that takes the aggregations notes created earlier in the moring and transcludes them in and repointed them to not go into the other categories, but all go into Review. This hasn’t run perfectly yesterday nor today (it works when I trigger it to run manually, but not from the trigger to run the script), but it is getting closer.

Protecting Focus is Key

Protecting focus and being able to quickly shift focus and be productive is key and has been something I’ve been working to do since I was a kid. Over the years I’ve learned the distractions and how to pull focus and calm back in. Removing the friction from abundance of information already in where I needed clean space to quickly capture created the large problem.

Now my big next step is sorting out the time to actually get a good weekly review done from what I’ve aggregated. The capture has been really good, but I just need to get better about protecting time on Sunday (or move this to Saturday) so I can sit and focus on what was done, what I can reduce and what needs focus to get done.

Fragile Automation Systems

I have a set of early morning aggregation automations I run and in the last few months I’ve run into oddities with regular automated syndication of data streams. I have quite a few things that push to a Slack channel, but it something keeps changing with Slack and it isn’t capturing anything. Much of it seems to be on the Slack end of things where inbound connections route to a Slack bot and not to the hardwired channel in the instance.

Slack used to be the stable and solid endpoint for tracking data, but something has changed.

I have a few different services that have triggers for automating capturing, copying, and writing data in another service where I can more easily make use of it through pushing it to a calendar, spreadsheet, central messaging (where I control when I pay attention to it), and moving it into a format for review or to work with on some calm cadence. Slack is one of the calm endpoints, and sometimes midpoint where I pull certain things in the last day or two from Slack to be in full view with other related items working around.

My keyboard shortcut app of choice for more than a decade has been hitting odd security lockouts that keep it from working. The lockouts are from other apps or services and they lock it from working across the device. I have around 15 to 20 shortcuts I use regularly to insert templates, drop in URLs, add dates, and more. But, when it gets locked I type the three or four keystrokes and nothing happens. It is like being in a dreamworld and a door won’t open. After an hour or few the lock goes away and it works. I’ve contacted the vendor and they are trying to sort out what is now causing this.

When then the automations and silent systems break or an interface is empty, but should have quite a few things in it and there are only a few, it is a little disconcerting. Fragile services aren’t new, but many solid services for years are now increasingly fragile and that trend needs to reverse.

My Automations Over the Ages and Today’s View

For a few decades I’ve converted regular manual tasks into automated tasks for many things. I use short code keyboard conversions with TextExpander (TextExpander), Alfred (Alfred), Keyboard Maestro (Keyboard Maestro), Hazel (Hazel by Noodlesoft), Apple Shortcuts, and a couple other small apps and services. But, I also have quite a few scripts in python and Ruby, but a few pure bash scripts. I have a handful of apps that use Claude Cowork (Claude Cowork | Claude by Anthropic) on a schedule and used where the data is not always standard, so it aggregates and structures the data where it often later gets processed by python.

I started building and running automation scripts in the 1990s to handle tedious tasks with multiple steps, or would likely be victims for typos, and which I was handling daily. A task that would take 3 or more minutes (often longer) and had structured stable data I could search made it viable to become a script and automated. I had them to filter email to folders, filter downloads to common folders / directories, and one to turn off audio for the evening which monitored Twitter every 30 minutes for my nightly signoff (“off to read and sleep - zzzz”) and it would mute audio. I’ve had a few for audio that would capture podcasts I was on for a local copy during recording that took just one button click to set Audio Hijack Pro properly and it just worked.

Moving to the Current Adaptive Flows

The last six months (or a little more) I’ve been building aggregators to capture what I’ve done the day before (and the week prior for a manual review). I’ve also automated my morning Obsidian (Obsidian) setup, so that my daily note (or Daily Dump for my notes, in my vocabulary) templates are created for the week ahead with a python script, rather than creating a new note and use a TextExpander snippet to build the structure each morning. But, doing this I realized that I could take my daily task list and the list of potential tasks I keep at the top of my Daily Dump and script the moving uncompleted items to that day’s Daily Dump from the day prior, but also quickly run a calendar scan for the day with Claude and the BusyCal MCP to have my known items at the top of the note written directly in the note. The completed items and checked off were left on the prior day’s Daily Dump in their sections.

In order to run the scheduled python scripts I need my laptop to be awake in the background (but it still the screen remain locked) so to run early morning tasks. I found PMSET as the key to handle the wake-up for the first run and have a python script handle the remaining wake-up processes for that day.

I now have a mix of Claude Cowork Skills (which if I sort out the data is stable enough I convert them to python for consistency, speed, and sustainability) and python scripts that pull my prior day’s files created and worked on list, my items in a feed of the prior day’s additions to Instapaper, Pinboard, and a list of new items in DevonThink as PDF (with links to the PDF as well as a working URL to the source of the item), a list of Readwise articles and video transcripts, and videos I liked and sent to my personal instance of Slack. These lists are in markdown and placed into the directory Obsidian watches over. Most of them a little later in the morning are transcluded into my Daily Dump note for the day where I read through them.

Morning Process

My morning process is to read through what was done the day before and edit them to add links to other resources in Obsidian and write notes. Often I have some entries that will turn into that day’s list of things to do or one of the “potentials” list. I will take items that need to be their own item note or be included into a concept note. This keeps the items fresh on my brain and connecting things to where I can get back to them more easily.

I write this today, as this morning I found my morning automation hadn’t fully run properly, because my Sunday evening script to create the week’s Daily Dump notes didn’t run as it was a cronjob and I was cooking with the laptop asleep so the job didn’t kick off. This morning I converted the cronjob to a launchd task instead and to run on Sunday during another automated wake open window.

Weekly Aggregation

Sunday’s I also run a weekly wrap-up, that pulls everything done for the week. I’m finding this is a bit too much information for a quick review and a manual assessment for the week where I aim to map out things for the upcoming week. It is a bit too much information overload. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. Now that I have things automated and aggregated I need to rework my human side of things.

The Value of the Automation

The goal of my automations is to give me time back and remove the manual and grunt work so I can do the thinking work. I’ve done this with personal life and work life (and large systems and projects). The current round of automation and aggregation surfaced that I am doing more than I thought I was doing. Another goal is to give more time to do the human thinking and the projects and work needed. I do this so I can do the creative human work and the human thinking work (I find large errors in summarization in nearly all generative AI and creative work so I keep that at bey and use it for grunt work that I check). The scripted automations don’t need the hand holding and I have some occasional test run to check on them to see if they need attention and honing.

Automating the Daily Dump Note

In work and personal life I’ve long been an automator. It started in the ’90s, but actually started when I was a kid and talking with my dad about systems, making them more efficient, and removing steps, and automations. Any manual rote step I look at and think about making it a click or “just run”. I’ve used Obsidian since June 2020 and have a lot of things in my markdown notes trigged by TextExpander.

Reducing Steps Setting my My Daily Dump Note

Little by little I’ve been building out some automations for my note taking that sits under Obsidian’s watchful eye, but may start elsewhere or seeds start elsewhere. In the morning I run some automations that sweep up videos of interest I forwarded to myself from the prior evening or that morning that are in a personal instance of Slack. I have one that pulls in notes in Drafts with a specific tag then archives the note. One last piece I’d really like to add is to have my known items from across my calendars dropped in at the top of that Daily Dump note.

Getting the calendar dump is something I’d really like to have before I get to my laptop in the morning. But, each of these automations could and should be automated and dropped in the note before I fully get to it as well.

This takes one thing… having the note.

Creating the note with the series of headers and subheadings is something I usually do in a new markdown note with TextExpander each morning. But, I can’t automate with TextExpander (or I haven’t sorted out how to trigger that from a far).

Automating but Not with Apple Shortcuts

I started a couple days ago thinking that since I had Actions for Obsidian I could easily create a new Daily Dump with the correct future date as a title and have it trigger the Templater template for the note with the correct date. I quickly got the file created properly, but in over 4 hours that included a couple hours the following day it was still not working properly. This also included a few different apps and pieces and if any of them change it breaks.

Since I not only wanted to create one note with a template for the next day, but to have a few days ahead created (say a week at a time). I gave up on Shortcuts and in under 20 minutes I had a python script doing exactly what I wanted. This included setting up a cronjob to run it on Sunday evening and have a week of notes set.

Using the Output

This morning I opened Obsidian and one of the future day’s notes I had setup as tests was a click away and I was capturing an idea. This is a nice change and one I wished I had done long ago.

The next step is automating bringing in the aggregation automations notes and dropping that into my Daily Dump.

My Writing Process with Obsidian

A few times lately my writing process has come up as it relies heavily on markdown for portability, longevity access, flexibility, and using the Shift Happened – Part 2: Small Apps Loosely Joined – Personal InfoCloud. The Small Apps Loosely Joined concept is something I use heavily for many things, but for writing the use of markdown I use the concept quite heavily.

Recently in a IndieWeb gathering, James who runs and writes James’ Coffee Blog shared his process and workflow for writing through to posting on his site, which was similar to my own process, but uses different tools along the way. He had something in his process he was looking to improve upon so I walked through my process.

My Process has Morphed Over the Years

My current writing process is an extension and evolution from my initial processes that trace back to college. But, it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s that my current process formed iterated upon. My early writing for blog posts and articles all start in markdown, which years back was well structured text and sometimes HTML for the structure.

My notes prior to formal blogging (started at the tail end of 2000) that I posted to my site were all hand coded HTML (or raw coding). If a note was going to turn into a blog post it quickly was marked up, and often as I was making the note or post.

Automate Early

One of the core elements I learned in the 1990s was to automate early for anything you can automate, use the tools you have at hand to help yourself be more productive. Most of my writing up through around 2010 was text and then quickly turned into HTML markup, as it is simple to do. But, the tough part is connecting related content, which is why I created my personal content management system (CMS) to run this vanderwal.net blog in 2000 and fully put it to use in 2001 (I used Blogger for a bit early on). Taking rote patterns and automating them was a great addition to help my process in 2000 to now.

In 2010 I shifted all of my note taking to markdown as moving across apps and devices made using other note making methods difficult to access and use. This shift to full markdown for notes, helped my writing move from notes to posts and articles much easier.

Markdown Workflow Process

Today and the last 5 years my notes start most often in Obsidian (and on mobile in Drafts, which is great for the good practice of get it out of your head and then sort out what to do with it). I have many notes flagged as “blogfodder” and track those through the writing process and moving them from a stub of an idea, to draft, not posted but ready, and posted (which includes a link to where it was posted). I’ll have another post about my new blogfodder process, which I’m really liking.

The writing starts as a note and gets fleshed out, if it is needed. If it is a short item I may stay in Obsidian and then grab and drag the markdown file in the Finder to the next step (I will get to this shortly).

Quite often I will leave Obsidian and from it click to open the Finder with the markdown file highlighted and then open that file in iA Writer - iA Writer, which is a nice focussed writing app for markdown, with additional capabilities. I often use the old journalism marker for needs attention (tk!) or “to correct” for things that need links, fact checks, or reference notes. Once I’m happy with the writing and structure in iA Writer (or Obsidian) I move to the next step.

Move to Prep for Posting

In years past I would take the markdown and quickly take the markdown structure and convert it to HTML markup by hand. Around 2013 or so I started scripting this transition, but the script was fussy. I’m not sure when, but it wasn’t long after this, I ran across Marked 2 - Marked 2. I think I started using Marked to convert markdown to PDFs and Word documents (for things that need to be sent out for formal article transformation in publications from Word). But, I realized Marked 2 had really good markdown to HTML conversion that was as good as my script, but not fussy. As I moved to Obsidian with properties in front matter and a footer with blogfodder tracking, it can remove all of that with ease, translate external links very nicely, and remove all backlink notation.

It is often in Marked 2 that I find markdown problems or the tk! marks. Marked 2 also includes some light grammar checking, which I appreciate and I’ll work through those suggestions. Then I flip to the HTML markup view and make edits, if needed, there.

Open My Blog Entry Form

Once I’m happy enough with the post I open my blog entry for for vanderwal.net or Personal InfoCloud and paste the HMTL into the form for the body of the post. On vanderwal.net I add in the title, location, type of post (these days everything is a weblog, but in the past it was more diverse), then select the related categories and submit it. Then I just to look at the post and review it again. If it needs an edit (up until July 5th) I would go into the database and make edits to the post there, but now have an edit process in my CMS (after 25 years, I figured it was about time). Once that is done, I go click to generate the RSS feed for the site, and send out alerts to services that share out links and summaries farther.

Wrap-up of the Workflow

This workflow is now done, except for seeing spelling errors or things not right and needing tweaks.

The process that starts in a markdown note, then progresses through to a more formal writing process and flow. I replaced a lot of manual steps that I didn’t think were difficult nor took a lot of time and automated the steps that do exactly what I had been doing with the same level of care, but saving time and reducing errors.

I don’t use AI in any of this writing process. I run across too much AI written content that is lifeless and doesn’t sound like the writer any longer. I’ve stopped reading many colleagues who used to have great ideas and a great personal voice, but are now just bland slop through the use of AI that tilts at, but doesn’t achieve mediocrity.

I have my own quirks and writing patterns, which I am fine with. I don’t write to impress, but to get honest ideas and understandings out. I blog and write to find connection with others of like or similar minds.

Link Like Bin 6 December 2014

A week of clean-up on work and project front and prepping for a some personal projects and getting new work projects settled and sorted for the new year (you still have time to grab some time, you this is you reach out and say hello).

I am also in the midst of moving from the sofa as my work space and back to my desk. This summer the lighting was much better at the sofa and then had a stretch of work travel where my desk got buried when I dumped my bag on Friday returns and not really dealt with before Monday’s trip back out. While the sofa is comfortable and the natural light is still great, I miss having a good work space to have a few books open and working through things.

Links for the Week of 6 December 2014

• Getting Started with JavaScript for Automation on Yosemite
• Dan Saffer’s “My Favorite Design Articles 2014”"
• Chris Messina Google+ post - I forgot to add this one last week and may have spent more time thinking about it than any other thing I’ve read in a while
• Design Explosions: Issue #1: Mapping on iOS - a great in depth breakdown of visual and interaction design through comparison of Google Maps and Apple Maps on iOS devices. So much goodness in this one
• Cloud Typography: Webfonts by Hoefler - I have no idea how I just ran across this during the past week, but cloud font and Hoefler type at a great price. My design iterations just got a new twist thrown in them
• Typed - Always a sucker for good new text writing app with Markdown and this is a real gem that fits in the light and easy to use category
• Sixty Words - RadioLab - I finally gave this a focussed listen and it was well worth it

Mister Home Automation Example

My favorite home automation site is Mister Home. I am constantly returning to see what he has added to list of functionality. At some point I will take the dive into X10 and Mister Home may be my first stop.