Tag Archives: Yahoo!

Slogger

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Memories.Slogger

Every once in a while I run across something I’ve seen before but ignored accidentally until I see it in great big headlines and neon and stop to pay attention to it and discover that it does something I really really want. This particular afternoon it was the product Slogger from Brett Terpstra. The software is a Ruby script, and Ruby is a delightful programming language that I’ve had the pleasure of dabbling in. Nowhere near the level of Brett and the people who help him, but here and there, little things.

The need came from a simple Google query, IFTTT and Day One. Looking for some way to bridge that divide between the automatic web service that I’ve fallen in love with, IFTTT and Day One, the journaling software that works quite well and renders DropBox a “Killer App”. Dropbox is the glue that keeps my Day One system together, on my laptop, my desktop, and all my mobile devices. When I found Slogger it was a definite Eureka moment, the answer all in one place. I downloaded the code as the author describes and tried to set it up.

Monumental fail. Pieces everywhere, error codes puking on the screen faster than I could read, pages and pages of interpreter and compiler errors, all surrounding one “Ruby Gem” module called hpricot. I knew why this was fail-town for me, it was because I had installed XCode CLI tools in order to get the mac_google_authenticator PAM module built. That CLI package rendered my system retarded when it came to processing gem requests. In the Ruby world there is a system established for distributing software written in Ruby, it’s called ‘gem’ and you run it much like apt-get in Ubuntu, it’s really quite straightforward and never has given me fits – until. Everything was complicated by the fact that I couldn’t really find where XCode was on my machine, all the likely targets to search didn’t have anything relevant and my find command returned pages of errors and I didn’t have the patience to pick through a thousand lines of “Permission Denied” to find the one spot where the file was hidden.

Didn’t need to complain, as I knew the solution. Download XCode for real. So off to Apple, download the monster and install it. That satisfied hpricot, and everything else installed quite nicely. I set Slogger up, pointed it at my Dropbox and configured the plugins that I wanted. The initial run crashed and burned but I figured out why, it was an errant space in the line that points to the Day One folder, a symbolic link fixed that and I was again off to the races. Of all the plugins that I configured these were successful:

  1. BlogLogger
  2. facebookifttt
  3. goodreadslogger
  4. lastfmlogger
  5. pocketlogger
  6. rsslogger

Then there were the plugins I tried to configure but couldn’t:

  1. fitbit
  2. flickrlogger
  3. getgluelogger

The primary problem with the fitbit plugin was that fitgem, the Ruby assistant program that you have to install is a phantom. You install it, it’s successful, and then it’s gone. No trace of it exists. You try again, poof, nowhere. Plus for the plugin setup there are API codes, User codes, and oAuth codes. I get the reasoning behind all of them and getting most of them was not an issue. I felt a little awkward creating an “Application” for just myself, it seems kind of a waste of effort to ferret all these bits and peices into a semiformal request procedure, but doing it wasn’t hard or cost anything, so what the hell. The part where it all falls apart for fitbit is where you have to get the oAuth token, since fitgem never worked and it’s invocation from slogger should have opened a web browser and asked for my approval, all of that never happened. I tried to be sporting and do the heavy lifting myself but all I did was irritate the API for fitbit and I figured, what the hell, I got most of what I was after and moved the fitbit plugin into the “unused” folder and forgot all about it. Abandon ship, y’arrrr!

Flickr is a pain in the ass. It’s Yahoo and as such, it’s kind of an Internet leper. You need your Flickr number, there’s a site that makes that easy, except it doesn’t work. Flickr username? Feh, either the one in Flickr or your linked Yahoo ID is meaningless. I half figured it was in the URL anyways, but then I thought about it and I don’t really use Flickr all that much beyond a solitary IFTTT rule and that’s precarious as it is. The only attractive part of Flickr is they gave out 1TB of storage. Still lepers tho. So, abandon ship! Y’arrrrr!

GetGlue was the last great effort. Much like Klout, it’s a site that makes sense sort of, but the name is utterly silly. GetGlue. What the hell? Why? Glue has nothing to do with TV or Movies. The only connection I could think of was celluloid and horses-processed-into-glue sort of connection. They give away stickers, what a wonderful bit of pollution that is, and as a gimmick seems dumb. The plugin needs an RSS feed for the GetGlue Activity Stream. It appears as though the GetGlue folks have moved away from RSS and towards “widgets” which seems stupid as in this application RSS is the answer and widgets are worthless. Alas, Google searching for the RSS feed method was fruitless. I was half hoping for something like http://getglue.com/user/bluedepth/feed.rss, where I could just craft it up and be on my merry way. No. You have to “View Source” to find it, which is stupid because that is so full of CSS flotsam and jetsam as to be utterly incomprehensible. Again, my ardor for that particular service was fog on a hot day. I don’t need it. I don’t use it. Whatever! Abandon ship! y’arrrrr!

So I tried the slogger script, it failed, tore out fitbit goop and then it worked. Then I went into my Day One app and mopped up all the mess that testing had made. The only oddity I noticed was the BlogLogger completely missed out on the text on my WordPress site that was between pre tags. Meh. Not really a reason to kick the entire thing to the curb, just something to honestly stop using. HTML is a right bastard, almost all of the time. CSS is a filthy abomination, but we won’t go there.

I would say that tonight everything will work as it should for Slogger, but I have to race to work tonight to turn everything off because work is going to exit-stage-left when it comes to the Internet. They are turning the entire thing off, at least for a few hours. I can’t wait for tomorrow, there will be lulz.

So, to Mr. Terpstra, thank you for slogger. I’m sorry the plugins didn’t work, that fitgem was a phantom, but at least most of what I wanted worked. So we sound a victory cheer, sort of. Yaaay!

I say hello, I say goodbye…

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For a few months I’ve used an app called Platypus on my Mac to create a pseudo-app that bundles a bash shell script which instructs my Mac to open various applications that I want to use during the day. What I want is very specific, I want to be able to login quickly to a idle Mac, but I want to have one icon to click on to start an entire host of applications, if I want to. The overall solution would of course be to mark every app as “Open on Login” but I don’t want them all to open each and every time I log-in, I’m picky. The bash script uses the open command to open applications. This command works well enough, but it leaves my screens littered with open application windows. This is not exactly what I want. I want all my applications to be opened, then I want them to be hidden. Cake and eat it too.

This morning, on a lark, I investigated alternatives to using Platypus. I know there is AppleScript, but I never really delved very deeply into the language. A little browsing and some tinkering and I have exactly what I want:

tell application “Mail” to activate
tell application “Firefox” to activate
tell application “iTunes” to activate
tell application “/Applications/Yahoo! Messenger.app” to activate
tell application “Stickies” to activate
tell application “Remote Desktop” to activate
tell application “Server Admin” to activate
tell application “Evernote” to activate
tell application “iCal” to activate
tell application “iChat” to activate
delay 0.5
tell application “Finder” to set visible of process “Mail” to false
tell application “Finder” to set visible of process “iTunes” to false
tell application “Finder” to set visible of process “Yahoo! Messenger” to false
tell application “Finder” to set visible of process “Stickies” to false
tell application “Finder” to set visible of process “Remote Desktop” to false
tell application “Finder” to set visible of process “Server Admin” to false
tell application “Finder” to set visible of process “Evernote” to false
tell application “Finder” to set visible of process “iCal” to false
tell application “iChat”
set minimized of window “bluedepth@gmail.com” to true
set minimized of window “andymchugh@atlas.dev.wmich.edu” to true
set minimized of window “AIM Buddy List” to true
set minimized of window “andy.mchugh@chat.facebook.com” to true
end tell

This script, shoved into an Application icon opens up every app I want in the morning, then hides them, except for iChat, it minimizes every window but my Bonjour list. I discovered that if I accidentally have a volume open when I run the script and there is an application in the volume and I ask that it be activated, the Mac is confused and asks me to pick the application from the list – so for Yahoo I had to explicitly state which one I wanted. Not a bug, just me being lazy.

The flipside of this also occurred to me. In the evenings I want to close all my applications. I could of course rely on the log-out procedure to do all the mopping up but there are some apps I use, like GroupWise and VirtualBox that can upset the log-out sequence. This script unmounts all volumes and then quits all open applications. That way I close all my apps before I log-out. Again, with the lazy:

tell application “Finder”
set bootDisk to name of startup disk
set otherDisks to every disk whose (name is not bootDisk)
repeat with myDisk in otherDisks
try
eject myDisk
end try
end repeat
end tell

tell application “System Events” to set the visible of every process to true
set white_list to {“Finder”}
try
tell application “Finder”
set process_list to the name of every process whose visible is true
end tell
repeat with i from 1 to (number of items in process_list)
set this_process to item i of the process_list
if this_process is not in white_list then
tell application this_process
quit
end tell
end if
end repeat
on error
tell the current application to display dialog “An error has occurred!” & return & “This script will now quit” buttons {“Quit”} default button 1 with icon 0
end try

Yay for Lazy! 🙂