Wrapping Text in Drafts

12 Feb 2023

Last summer I created a Drafts action for a user to allow them to mark some text in IA writer’s Markdown syntax for a highlight. Now my solution was not the first solution offered, but it was a little different to the others, and I have been meaning to write it up for quite some time now to go into a bit more detail about how it works and the benefits it provides over other, existing solutions.

Creating An Obsidian Annual Timeline

05 Feb 2023

A few days ago I published a post about a change to how I am managing my daily tasks in Obsidian. Within that post I included a bit about how I am pulling that task list through into my dashboard canvas, and this threw up a bit of interest on Mastodon with a few people asking how I had produced a timeline on my dashboard. While I provided a few pointers at the time, I promised to go through in more detail what I have in place, and that is what I will be doing in this post.

An Obsidian Daily Task List

29 Jan 2023

My use of Obsidian as a personal knowledge management (PKM) tool sees me making extensive use of daily notes. Each day I work, I create a new note and use it to keep an activity journal of all the key things I have done, link out to notes for meetings I have attended, things I have learned, etc. I also display my key tasks (for today and a soon as possible) and record any of the key tasks I have completed that day.

I have always taken to cutting and pasting to transfer incomplete tasks to transfer them forward to the next daily note. But after having tried out Roam Research a few years ago and working with their task management approach, I have always felt that my method was inefficient; but as with many things Obsidian, I found a better way utilising a third-party plugin.

Run Shortcuts in the Background from Drafts

31 Dec 2022

Practically, since Apple made Shortcuts available on the Mac, Drafts has supported executing Drafts and processing the return. To do this, Drafts passes control to Shortcuts, bringing it to the foreground, and then switches back to Drafts at the end. This feels suspiciously like an x-callback-url call of a shortcut.

While x-callback-url is a very useful option, on the Mac, we have more options and control over how we interact with other automation applications, and in this post I’ll outline an alternative that allows you to run a shortcut in the background.

New Obsidian Notes from Drafts

29 Dec 2022

Yesterday I posted some details around using Shortcuts to send a new note to Obsidian. Today, I’m going to look at a different and also popular capture option for Obsidian; using one of my favourite applications, Drafts.

New Obsidian Notes from Shortcuts

28 Dec 2022

Something I have seen come up time and again is the use of Apple Shortcuts to create content inside of an Obsidian vault. Since it seems to be something that so frequently comes up, I thought I’d try my hand at explaining a couple of techniques that can be used, and what the pros and cons are around these methods.

The Top Benefits of Automation for Your Organisation

28 Nov 2022

Computer systems have been managing data for us since their inception, and these days we have sophisticated systems that do so at an incredible rate and with accuracy far exceeding human standards. Many organisations stop at the out-of-the-box functionality of their systems, and make assumptions about what is and what is not possible. We are here to tell you that through the application of automation techniques even more is possible, and this is no less true for the domains of HR and payroll than for any other. In fact many HR and payroll processes are highly automatable.

The primary reason that HR and payroll departments do not explore this is because they do not full understand what investing in automation solution could deliver. In this article we are going to take at why it is worth exploring automation for HR and Payroll.

Obsidian and Johnny Decimal Index Searches

27 Nov 2022

I have been using Obsidian as my personal knowledge management app of choice now for a few years, and recently I have been modifying one of my note vaults to a new indexing system. However, I stumbled across an interesting search issue with the indexing that required a bit of investigation to resolve.

Automation Documentation: Hooking SnippetsLab

26 Nov 2022

My efforts to link together my documentation and automation took a little jump forward recently with a new beta of the code library utility called SnippetsLab. A small update to the user interface has enabled me to construct a basic integration with Hookmark (the app formerly known as Hook). In this post I am going to explain a bit more about this.

Doctor Drafts in Your Scripts

31 Oct 2022

You may have heard of Doctor Drafts. It is my Alfred workflow for working with the app Drafts on the Mac. It has proven hugely popular, and I continue to expand and enhance the workflow as time permits. But, Doctor Drafts is already quite expansive, and more capable than people realise. While I’ve expounded in the past on how it is designed so that others can build their own custom workflows on top of Doctor Drafts, most people don’t realise that this extends beyond Alfred too. In this post, I am going to walk through how you can leverage Doctor Drafts functionality in your own scripts.