On Apr 21, 2015, at 21:27, Jean-Christophe Helary <email@hidden> wrote:I saw Macscripter.net and registered there the other day after my Terminal question but I can't seem to wrap my mind around online fora... I'll try again.
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Hey Jean-Christophe,
Personally I hate Internet forums.
They harken back to CompuServe and AOL and other bbs systems we outgrew decades ago.
Nevertheless MacScripter is a good resource and worth using.
If you like RSS readers (which I don't) it has a feed.
I wrote my own reader for MacScripter using AppleScript, Safari, and BBEdit.
If you don't have BBEdit then it's freeware little brother TextWrangler will do.
You also need the Satimage.osax AppleScript extension for regular _expression_ support and other useful features that should but don't come stock in AppleScript.
You also need a utility for running AppleScripts from the keyboard such as FastScripts or Keyboard Maestro. (I've used both since 2003 & 2004 respectively.)
With my reader I: - Hit a keyboard shortcut to open the MacScripter.net new posts page in Safari.
- I try to do this at least once per day.
- If there are new posts I hit it again to parse the page and write the links to a specific text file in BBEdit.
- These are sorted by title and date.
- Then I have another keyboard shortcut for Safari to open the first unread topic on the BBEdit document in the front Safari page.
- Items are marked as read, as I go through them.
It sounds a bit complicated (and it was to design and set up), but in execution it's very quick and simple.
I run through posts quickly and save anything useful as a webarchive for future reference, although I'll dawdle over anything that piques my interest and answer it if I can.
Currently I have 7 new posts and 80 old ones to go through.
If you're interested I can set you up with the scripts.
I also have an AppleScript that is run from Keyboard Maestro and utilizes Default Folder to auto-save MacScripter.net webarchives in the appropriate folder. (It maps domains to folders and does this for a variety of sources.)
* Jon Gotow very generously added some features to Default Folder a few years ago to make this easy.
I started writing AppleScripts long before there were any books, and I learned the lingo by hanging out on the Applescript Users List (still active) and MacScrpt (now mostly quiet) Listservs and tearing apart all the scripts posted to see how they worked.
When I was a noob I had to ask a lot of questions, because of all the things in AppleScript that aren't obvious and/or don't conform to normal programming language syntaxes. (I thought it was very confusing initially.)
It took me a couple of years before I was regularly the one answering the questions.
It's much easier these days. The many books. The multitudinous resources on the net. Google.
But you still have to have mentoring to keep from pulling your hair out. :)
-- Best Regards, Chris
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