12 days of microblogging: linkblogging manton.org

@manton You know what is missing? Linkblogging tools for Safari....I don't think the Mac app adds this feature, is there an extension I've missed?

@kaa I experimented with writing a bookmarklet, but it didn't work fully because return characters between the quote weren't passed to Micro.blog. Not sure if an extension will be needed yet.

@kaa @manton My Mac is too old for the Mac app so I can’t test myself, but is there any AppleScript support in M.b for Mac? It would be super-easy to AppleScript if so…

@smokey @kaa Not AppleScript, but there's a URL scheme for starting a new post documented here.

@manton So it’s not the URL scheme handling that’s stripping the returns with the bookmarklet, then, but something on the JS end or elsewhere? I’d assumed the bookmarklet was calling the URL scheme….

An AppleScript could definitely set up the text and then call the microblog://post? URL… // @kaa

@smokey Right, I think something with the JavaScript, but I haven't looked closely enough to know. Maybe I'll share the in-progress version in a blog post for others to tweak.

@kaa Have you tried using Quill?

@smokey @kaa @rosemaryorchard @manton I know we are talking about the Mac, but fwiw, the iOS app extension supports link sharing natively.

@manton 👍

@rosemaryorchard Could never get into that app. All I'm actually looking for is an extension support for the Mac like it runs on iOS. Just use the share icon and have a little popup come up with everything that I need :). It's not the end of the world, but I definitely would linkblog more if I had this in place.

@manton Also I always bullet-list my links, before the quote if any, so they stand out from my content. Inline links read as either definitions or suck.com-type snark, and posts that redirect to link like DF are confusing.

@smokey as you use WordPress you could use AppleScript to post there and hence to micro.blog

@manton Share extension in the micro.blog Mac app would do the trick, wouldn’t it?

@rosemaryorchard Thanks Rose! That solves the posting from Windows issue I had.

@smokey If you're on a Mac, want to select text on a web page and send it to Micro.blog then MarsEdit is what you need…

@esjewett That's what I thought would have been the best way...but I guess it doesn't work for everyone.

@johnjohnston @Miraz Plenty of options, certainly; I was just exploring in my head and out loud how we might solve @kaa’s use-case right now as a community and without necessarily requiring Manton to find more hours in the day to implement a share extension on the Mac…. :-)

@manton We talked about this in Slack, but I've had good luck with this doing multi-line capture into the app:

<a href="javascript:document.location.href='microblog://post?text='+encodeURIComponent(window.getSelection());" title="Send to Micro.blog">Send to Micro.blog</a>

Put that into some HTML, drag the bookmarklet into your browser, and it will capture any page highlighted text, including newlines, into the Mac app.

@incanus @manton slightly fancier version modeled on Pinboard's same page bookmarklet that captures the page title and makes a quote with the link below:

javascript:if(document.getSelection){s='> '+document.getSelection()+' ';}else{s='';};t=document.title;l=location.href;p='\n\n['+t+']'+'('+l+')';document.location='microblog://post?text='+encodeURIComponent(s+p);

@incanus @manton well the > should be a > and it doesn't quote subsequent lines if there are line breaks in the selection. Also I ended up moving the newlies into the selection so there are not empty lines at the top when no selection. Here it is in a gist.

@incanus @manton and one small update to fix empty selection false positives in Safari.

@ricky @incanus Thanks y'all! I'm going to post this to a help page (and my blog too) in case other folks want to use it.