I remember when we had Adium and you could connect almost all of your chat services to one client.

• Some features were missing, but the basic texting part usually worked.

We had a way to set our status to online, away, or offline. There was no need for Do Not Disturb or notification management since you just went offline and nobody could reach you.

• Actually, you can still use Slack like this.

• Some services even queued up your messages, so the next time you went online, new messages awaited you.

• I could even set the currently played music as my status.

Almost all messaging app had some form of proper native Mac app.

• Remember that Skype for Mac was actually a pretty decent Mac app with AppleScript support.

  • These days, it’s just an Electron app, although nobody uses Skype anymore…

• My friends used MSN Messenger too, which was kind of a crappy client, but at least you could use it through Adium.

These days, I have to use Cardhop to have proper messaging integration in my contact list to have a central place to jump into the different clients.

Almost all clients are stupid Electron apps on the desktop.

• Mobile clients are better: at least some of the biggest players have proper native apps on iOS.

• Facebook Messenger for Mac is a React Native app, which is a bit better than Electron.

I can’t go offline anymore; instead, I have to manage my notifications and schedule them using Focus modes.

I kinda miss old IM apps.

Play 2.0 just got released with a new channels feature.

• It’s behind a subscription, but you can try it for seven days.

I started using Play as a replacement for YouTube’s Watch Later list (and for other sites too, like Vimeo).

• YouTube is an attention magnet, and I want to avoid it when possible.

• Using the Watch Later feature makes this more hard.

• Play keeps me out of the YouTube app, mostly…

I also follow YouTube channels using RSS from Reeder instead of the YouTube app.

• This way, I have an integrated workflow of browsing videos, blog posts, Mastodon posts, etc.

• I’m also trying to give minimal data to Google through YouTube other than my watch history.

  • I have watch history turned off, but I’m sure Google still tracks it.

• Because of this workflow, it seems redundant to use Play to subscribe to the same list of YouTube channels.

I added my list of channels to Play anyway to test the Channels feature.

• It was a bit annoying since Play has no Shortcuts integration for managing channels or OPML import.

I don’t have a conclusion on the usefulness of this feature for me yet, but I’ll test it in the following week, and we will see if I keep the subscription or not.

I’m giving up the IndieWeb markup with bookmarks, since they kinda hard to get right.

All I want is a title and a blockquote, but with the IndieWeb markup I have to have a post content just to markup the link properly.

So, instead, I just add the “Bookmarked”, “Read”, “Liked”, etc. verbs to the title of the post and be done with it.

If someone has a better idea, let me know.

I also want to check if webmentions are triggered via the WordPress API.

Update

• They do!

It is actually occured to me that I can get the current Safari selection in Shortcuts, convert it to Markdown from Rich Text, then Markdown to HTML, then I end up with a blockquote.

• You need Drafts for the Markdown to HTML action.

Since all my respond type posts are created using one shortcut which decorates them with microformats, this makes me able to select text, and append it to the post.

• I use these IndieWeb post types:

  • Reply

  • Like

  • Repost

    • I don’t really use this as much.

  • Bookmark

  • Read

On the long run, this will give me context on why I saved something to my bookmarks.

Here’s a demo video in action.

I created a more advanced outline post format for my Bike based posts.

• Blogging with Bike

New entries will use a new bike-outline Stimulius controller which I originally created for my Zettelkasten, so I can have basic outline capabilities for Markdown lists.

It gets the post content and adds toggles to each outline row, so I can open and close them.

It also uses block IDs as row links, so each outline row can be linked independently.

• I don’t use Bike outline IDs, but generate them on-the-fly using checksums instead.

• This will change as I update the content, but it’s fine.

I’m just testing my blog post saving shortcut for my TaskPaper interstitial journal.

• TaskPaper as an interstitial journal – Decoding

I’m creating more rows, just for testing.

• This one is a child row of the previous one.

  • This one is a child row as well.

I don’t really care about the outline display now, because I exported it into Bike.

I can collapse, expand, and format it anyway I want.

Also, adding new rows/zettels is way easier this way, so I’ll create an export shortcut to Markdown and leave it like that for now.

Follow-up on 09:58.

Also, what if I migrate my outlining workflow to Bike and generate the outline from that file?

• It is already an HTML structure and the workflow of linking zettels and inserting them into the outline is easier on my Mac than the iPad, because it has a bigger display.

This would mean that the outline can link to the actual file in The Archive locally, which can be replaced with a [[wikilink]] when generating the outline from the Bike HTML.

• I can even do this using Shortcuts, there is no need for Ruby scripting.

Today’s project is to write a script which generates the Zettelkasten Outline page automatically, since I have zettel IDs present with the structure in note slugs.

I also want to make everything collapsed under level 3.

Previously

• Publish daily notes to my Zettelkasten from Bike

I created a shortcut which can export the current Bike selection to a new Markdown file in my Zettelkasten.

It doesn’t sync like my publish script does with WordPress, but it was easier to implement, since copy and paste between Drafts and Bike works pretty well.

• The shortcut just cleans up the text and sets the title if it’s needed.

• Otherwise it will create a headless zettel.

At the end it opens the note in The Archive app where I can edit it, or publish it using Git.

• This shortcut actually uses the following apps.

  • Keyboard Maestro to copy and paste the text from Bike to Drafts.

  • Shortcuts to clean-up the Markdown output.

  • Then Drafts to create a new Markdown file in my Zettelkasten.

Here’s a demo video

• In the video Archive complains about the “writing test”.

• It’s not related to the shortcut.

I’m spending my time today to integrate Micro.blog into my workflow.

• I changed the sidebar to let people quickly find me on Micro.blog (and Mastodon).

I also used Micro.blog to reply Mastodon posts a couple of times before.

• I follow people using RSS on Mastodon.

• I don’t have a Mastodon account, and don’t plan to create one.

• Replying to their posts from my RSS reader sucks, since I have to search for them on Micro.blog, type their username, find the post, then I can press the Reply button.

There should be a better way to find Mastodon posts on Micro.blog.

• Replying to a specific Mastodon post – External sites – Micro.blog Help Center

I created a shortcut which seems to work most of the time.

• Here’s a demo video of how you can use it.

• Download the shortcut

I’m tinkering with the idea of using my Bike journal to publish to my Zettelkasten directly.

• Blogging with Bike

• I don’t use month based files anymore in Bike, I create a new outline for each day.

My Zettelkasten is a Jekyll based site, so I have to work with Markdown content.

• It would be nice if I could convert these notes to Markdown files, then publish them to my Zettelkasten site directly.

• I found this project which does exactly this.

  • ~jonsterling/bike-convertors – Scripts to convert Bike outlines to idiomatic HTML and Markdown. – sourcehut git

In theory, I would use my publish script to manage the Zettelkasten daily notes in the same pipeline as my WordPress posts.

• Publish from Bike to Decoding

• Daily notes would be pre-filtered though.

  • I just export notes with the ZETTEL marker only.

  • I have to create a new Bike document for each entry before converting it to Markdown because I want to have separate notes for each entry, not just one big daily note.

I could use a daily Markdown file and keep that open in The Archive app, but I want to use Bike for this, because it is the best thinking and outliner tool.

• Also I’m already writing my journal in Bike. I don’t want to have another app.

As an interim solution, I created a Keyboard Maestro macro which copies and pastes the current entry into Drafts (and also converts it to Markdown), where I can post it manually.