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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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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Sometimes Shortcuts makes me scratch my head in bewilderment at how convoluted dealing with different data types can be. If you ever pull in an RSS feed to parse, you’ll know what I mean.

I’m writing a shortcut for Ronnie Lutes to easily publish episodes of The Liner Project. Why he needs a shortcut to do this is another topic, but primarily it’s because we’re hosting his site in a static site generated by Hugo. In order for him to get an episode added, uploaded, and scheduled for publication without having to deal with an annoying checklist of tasks that all have to be done in exactly the right way each time, an automation is perfect.

In order to present as few information-gathering dialogs and text boxes to Ronnie as possible, the shortcut tries to figure out everything it needs to about the episode being published, including things like season and episode number. A lot …

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It’s amazing the caliber of people who just randomly pop into your Twitter life sometimes. I posted about the lack of text diff tools on iOS a couple days ago, and the very next day Jacob Sam-La Rose very kindly gave me a tip that took me in a direction I didn’t expect: JavaScript and web views.

It turns out that Jacob is the author of a very handy Diff action for Drafts that uses this very trick to let people compare a draft in current form to a previously saved version. It’s really cool use of a web preview and it’s something I would have used many times in Drafts had I realized it existed.

As Jacob mentioned to me, the JavaScript Diff Algorithm written by John Resig is easily applied to any JavaScript parser such as Scriptable, which also allows for easy file selection for choosing two …

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When I started the Hugo-based incarnation of this website, I wrote all posts for the site in iA Writer. It’s a very clean and focused Markdown text editor suited well for blogging with Hugo or other platforms that take Markdown and convert it to HTML.

Then I accidentally discovered a secret about Ulysses.

When you export a sheet to Markdown text from Ulysses, you get a text file of plain text with all your Markdown formatting. But when you attach images to that same sheet and export it as Markdown, it gives you a zip file with your Markdown document and all attached images. Furthermore, if you put the images in the text of the document, Ulysses lets you add image metadata which it then puts into the Markdown image tags that it creates.

The above image shows what it looks like when I attach an image to the sheet (attachment seen in the right attachments pane) and drag it into the document and add …

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