I can safely say that Emacs (with Org mode) is my new PKM app. It is really good (and I’m telling you as someone who loves Vim).

• I started to mess around with Org mode about a week ago.

• Org mode is just an awesome way of organizing information and actually do something with it.

I added Hookmark integration for Org mode based on these scripts.

• Video → Using Emacs with Hookmark

I’m still going to use Vim for web development, but Emacs is my thinking space now (my home-grown Roam if you will).

• Of course I’m using Evil mode in Emacs.

• I don’t have time to learn a new way of editing text currently.

I want to toggle my Dock position between the left side and the bottom of the screen, depending on the context I’m in.

To do this…

• Save this Apple Script.

  • tell application “System Events” to tell dock preferences

    • if screen edge is bottom then

      • set screen edge to left

    • else if screen edge is left then

      • set screen edge to bottom

    • end if

  • end tell

• Make a new Keyboard Maestro global macro that runs it.

  • I assigned ⇧⌥⌘D to toggle the Dock.

Here’s a demo in action.

Inspired by a recent post about keeping the menubar a bit more compact, I switched the menubar clock to the analog version.

• How to Change the macOS Menu Bar Clock from Digital to Analog

Since clicking on the clock also toggles Notification Center, adding the Clock widget (with a monthly calendar) made sense, which is way more readable than the small one in the menubar.

• I can even toggle Notification Center with the Globe-N keyboard shortcut for quick clock access.

On the other hand, I remembered a Mac app, called FuzzyClock. It’s an old app that shows you the time, kinda… Instead of displaying 8:23, it just says twenty past eight. Sadly, FuzzyClock doesn’t work on newer systems anymore, but I found FuzzyTime which is a modern, reimagined version of FuzzyClock.

• What’s the point of these apps? Sometimes, maybe we’re too attached to being precise with our time, and not knowing exactly what the current time is can ease that, making us more focused.

Since I hid the digital clock because I wanted more space in my menubar, it’s not ideal if I see FuzzyTime running all the time. It takes up more space than the digital clock, but it would be nice to toggle it using a keyboard shortcut.

• I used Keyboard Maestro to automate the display of FuzzyTime.

• Pressing ⌃⌥⌘H will open FuzzyTime, and pressing the same shortcut again will just quit it, resulting an on/off toggle effect for FuzzyTime in the menubar, which is exactly what I want.

In essence, here’s how I check the time on my Mac now.

• Oh, I and still have plenty of space for my app icons in the menubar.

One annoying thing that happened today’s “beautiful” web is that we forgot that we have this CSS selector.

• a:visited

I was also sinful in this, since I just pushed a change which adds proper a:visited support to my site.

• This is mostly annoying for me, since I see almost all links as visited, but can be helpful for readers.

Now you can see visited links in a different color than the default links.

I found Type yesterday in the Club MacStories newsletter.

It is a simple app which let’s me append any text (with a timestamp) to plain-text files.

• Basically a quick capture tool for running lists.

  • Append to selected file (from list of running files – a la Merlin Mann’s “runx” file scheme) – Actions – Help & Questions – Drafts Community

  • Mac Power Users #23: Workflows with Merlin Mann – Relay FM

• LaunchBar can be also used to append text to plain-text files.

I haven’t kept any running list before in plain text; I just captured these ideas into Things directly.

I created a couple of new files using Type in my ~/Documents/Running Lists folder. Here are some examples.

• Brainstorm.txt

  • Following the Natural Planning Model in GTD, sometimes the best way to figure out something is to start writing about it.

    • Free-form thinking environment for writing – Decoding Zettelkasten

    • Journaling can help us to clarify next actions – Decoding Zettelkasten

• Debug.txt

  • Stole this idea from the Type app website.

  • It should be a log of steps I used to figure something out while programming.

  • Since this is just a capture file, steps must be migrated into proper how-tos later.

• Meeting.txt

  • A quick log of any meeting I’m attending to capture what we are talking about at the moment quickly.

Type is focused on just one task: append text to these files. It doesn’t disrupt my workflow.

But I still treat these files as an inbox in a sense, so after I capture anything here, it should be processed.

Instead of introducing yet another inbox, I integrated these files into an existing one.

• I’m big on having multiple capture tools, but just a couple of inboxes.

I made a shortcut that is triggered via Keyboard Maestro when I’m reviewing my TaskPaper journal.

• The shortcut grabs all running files and then lets me pick one.

• It grabs the content from the picked one, then appends it to my TaskPaper journal as a new entry.

• Finally, it cleans the picked running list file, so it’s ready for the next batch of ideas.

Here’s a demo video.

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.

The latest release of Bike just added row types which makes it way more useful.

Here’s a video on how this feature works.

• Jesse Grosjean: “Bike Outliner 1.13 adds row ty…” – Mastodon

I have some projects which use TaskPaper for project support, but I’ll starting using Bike more for.

• Thanks to the new “task” row type, it’s quite an easy switch.

Previously…

• Blogging with Bike

I created two new shortcuts which are helping me to start to write a new post from Bike.

• The first one called “Open Decoding File”, which opens (and optionally creates) the current month’s file.

  • I have monthly files, because of how my publishing script works.

  • It publishes every post from the currently opened Bike file, so I don’t want to keep the same long outline around for blogging.

    • It regenerates each post every time I’m adding a new one.

    • If there is a breaking change in the system, I can archive old files and just start a new one.

• The second one just inserts today’s date into the top, with an “DRAFT” block which can be used to start writing a new post.

  • I added a Keyboard Maestro macro to run this one from Bike.

  • I can press ⇧⌥⌘T to add a new date block on the top.

These shortcuts are using the Shortcuts integration which is available in the preview version.

• Bike 1.11 (120-121) Preview – Bike / Releases – Hog Bay Software Support

Here’s a demo video.

• Blogging from Bike

I’m just testing Hookmark integration with my Bike blogging script.

Update

• It works!

• So now I can…

  • Blog freely in Bike using a new outline for each month.

    • I can keep posts private using the SKIP keyword.

      • Replacing Craft with Bike as a thinking tool

    • Or I can publish them on the blog by adding a timestamp.

      • Blogging with Bike

• I removed embedding the permalink into the root node. Instead I use Hookmark to navigate between the post and the Bike node.

One of the best features of Craft is daily pages notes, which can be used as a starting point for many ideas and drafts.

I’m thinking of giving Bike a go as a daily logging app.

• This how my daily note looks like opened on my desktop.

  • I have Stickies open, because Grammarly doesn’t work in Bike.

Still, I like Bike better because there is so much power behind this simple app.

• I can automate things around my notes using standard Apple Script.

• I can parse Bike files using Ruby and Nokogiri.

• It can link to other parts of a document, even link to other rows in other Bike files.

• One of the best things about using Bike as my daily logging tool is that I can write blogposts inline and post them instantly.

  • I can’t do that with Craft.

  • Blogging with Bike

Craft is excellent for writing documents, so I’m not getting rid of it, but as a thinking tool, I like Bike better.

I can consider Bike as a starting point for everything I do creatively.

• Enhanced with Hookmark, I can even start a new anything and still go back to the source.

• I can continue a line of thought in a different app, like TaskPaper, which can be better for the task at hand.

  • This is how it looks in action.

Previously

• Posting digital garden seedlings from Bike

• Weirdly, I do this “interstitial journaling” for years now, without calling it anything…

• So this is my workflow for blogging from Craft at the moment…

• I should try to create a Craft extension to post stuff here directly…

• Posting status updates from Craft

I added a way to post digital garden seedlings to the blog.

What are seedlings?

• Seedlings are half-done articles/notes kept in a digital garden.

• They are like drafts, but we keep them public because not every one of them will be finalized.

• I can also use seedlings to privately reply to people using my blog and send them the link.

• Seedlings are entirely hidden, but you can find them if you know their URL.

The goal

• The goal of my Zettelkasten is to develop my notes into posts I publish here.

• I’m migrating my Zettelkasten notes from Craft into Bike because it’s more open, and I can do fun things with it, like post directly from it to my blog.

Posting seedlings from Bike

• There are note branches in my Zettelkasten, which can be migrated to a seedling, so I can start working on it.

• I extract these notes into separate files, naming them using their number from my Zettelkasten.

• I can invoke a simple Ruby script, which is going to prepare and post to my blog.

• The script also links them using Hookmark, so I can switch back and forth between writing the post and previewing it.

Demo

• 📺 Watch this quick demo video of the process

Previously

• Blogging with Bike