I haven’t talked more about regular expressions like I promised I would, but I’ll partially rectify that today by writing about a regular expression I created last night for my Blog Post Publish shortcut. This one applies specifically to how I name my blog post files for WTF Weekly.

Since WTF Weekly post titles are just dated blurbs like WTF Weekly for Oct 12th, 2020, I decided to name the post markdown files as consecutive numbers, starting at 1. I also make the post slug match this number so that the URLs are very simple, such as https://wtfweekly.me/41/ in the case of the one for Oct 12th, 2020.

Originally when I wrote my Blog Post Publish shortcut, I was entering slugs and file names manually as user input. This was partly because I do this already for this site, because instead of numbering posts, I give the files and slugs names related to the topic. The …

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Nova is here, and it’s every bit as super as you’d expect software from Panic to be.

What is it? It’s a Mac-native text editor for programmers that seems like has been under development forever, but in reality it’s only been something like 14 months since Panic first announced that Nova was the future of Panic text editors, replacing Code Editor, née Coda.

Nova’s got style and it’s got features with style. Local and remote servers, local and remote terminals, git support, hierarchical element support, multi-language syntax and highlighting support, tabs, built-in preview browser with inspector tools, and much, much more.

I’ll be interested to see how Panic does with this in the face of competition from the likes of Visual Studio Code and Atom, which are both very full-featured, support …

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I live in an area that was recently the most polluted city in the world, thanks to fires on all sides of us. Although I have the ability to glance at the AQI (Air Quality Index) widget on my Apple Watch and see the AQI instantly at any time, I also wanted to track AQI over time. To do so, I created a shortcut that uses Data Jar to store samples into periodically throughout the day, and to use the last 45 samples to generate a chart using Charty for Shortcuts actions which can then be displayed in an iOS widget stack using a Charty Widget.

The shortcut itself is quite simple. It gets the weather for the current location, and from that, the current AQI value. It then stores that value in Data Jar in a table called AQI with the current date and time (down to the second) as the key. …

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