In case you're wondering why I'm using the wrong tag for my acronyms, the HTML5 spec pretty much does away with the <acronym> tag, and <abbr> appears to be the new, all-purpose solution. It's not perfectly semantic, but there doesn't seem to be an ideal solution for acronyms in the spec. This command is really geared toward using the <abbr> for acronyms, but you could easily alter it to insert an <acronym> tag (especially if your doctype is anything other than 'html'), and it works pretty well for just quickly creating an actual abbreviation, too. It just doesn't try to guess how to abbreviate anything other than apparent acronyms, but it gives you Snippet tab stops for quick manual editing. If you run it with no selection, it will create a blank <abbr> tag you can tab through and fill in.

To use the command, just create a new TextMate Command in the Bundle Editor, preferably in your own personal bundle (create a new bundle with your name, if you need to). Set the Input to "Selected Text" or "Word", and the output to Insert as Snippet. Assign a key equivalent if you like. Since it's outputting HTML, it probably makes sense to set the Scope Selector field to "text.html", but who knows, you may prefer to use it outside of normal HTML source documents. Once it's set up, add the code below.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -rjcode -Ku

input = STDIN.read

if input =~ /^[A-Z]+$/
  print %Q{<abbr title="$1">#{input}</abbr>$0}
else
  acronym = input.scan(/[A-Z]/).join()
  if acronym.length < 2
    print %Q{<abbr title="${1:#{input}}">$2</abbr>$0}
  else
    print %Q{<abbr title="#{input}">${1:#{acronym}}</abbr>$0}
  end
end

It's probably not useful on a frequent enough basis be memorable in cases where you'd actually need it, but there it is. It's actually a small part of a larger experiment I played with today. I'll probably post about it this weekend, as it's useful not just with <abbr> tags, but with any tag with a descriptive attribute. Just a few lines of jQuery which can make the PTWW be more immediately useful, accessible and, well, look cooler.

And yes, I did just make that acronym markup with the above TextMate Command. I feel like a salesman who sells people things which seem perfect for situations they'll never find themselves in.

• Placeholder image TextMate Snippet
• Instant placeholder images with TextExpander
• TextMate drag command for Base64 encoding images

I'm using Ian Beck's VoodooPad Scratchpad scripts, and have been for over a year. I won't go into detail on the inner workings (I'm hoping to post a little more about them on TUAW soon), but the end result is a very well-connected log of what I've done, what I've found and what I've learned each day. Navigating them isn't difficult, but once you've run it for a year or more, you end up with a lot of very similarly named pages (2010-09-xx, etc.). I'm sure this is the case for anyone who's logging or journaling in VoodooPad, and if you've ever scrolled for more than a few seconds just to find the page for today, here's your (über-simple) answer.

--[[
VPLanguage = lua
VPScriptMenuTitle = Go to Today
VPShortcutKey = g
VPShortcutMask = command control
VPEndConfig
--]]

document = windowController:document()
pageName = os.date("%Y-%m-%d", os.time())
document:openPageWithTitle(pageName)

You'll want to edit the line with os.date() in it to match the format of your date-named pages. Then just save it as gototoday.lua in your Script Plugins folder (~/Library/Application Support/VoodooPad/Script Plugins). Restart VoodoPad and the shortcut Control-Command-G will jump to the current day. It's not smart, though, and if you don't have a page for the current day, it's going to make one. That could be good or bad, depending on your system.

I also wrote a script page within my scratchpad (called Today) that jumps to the current day instead of itself when you open it. It seems like one of those things that I just did to see if I could, and not worth troubling the internets with. If you're interested in it, ping me.

• Three things I discovered today
• A few scripts for TaskPaper users
• Saving Safari browsing sessions to Evernote

Primer: gleeBox is an amazing extension for Safari (and Chrome and Firefox) that gives you keyboard navigation of links, bookmarks, bookmarklets and more. If you haven't tried it out, you should.

A while back I wrote about fixing the highlights in gleeBox. I found them just ugly enough to require measures to soften the colors and handle padding a little differently. Well, color me tickled, the latest update that just showed up in my extensions panel brings, among other things, prettier highlights. Prettier than my makeshift ones, too. Just thought I'd share...

• Fixing Gleebox
• Instapaper Beyond: fix for text style controls
• Instapaper Beyond Bugs (fixed)

It uses the same navigation as Instapaper Beyond (mmm, clever), so pressing “h” will bring down a menu of the main commands available in the extension, and pressing the letter for a command (or clicking it in the menu) will provide more information about that command. In some cases, a short screencast is available, and I’ll put more up when I have a chance.

The page takes advantage of the fact that it’s pretty much exclusive to Safari 5, using HTML5 video tags and webkit transitions for much of the interface. That, and a little jQuery. The video player is a custom-styled <video> tag, which was something I’ve been meaning to figure out how to pull off.

I hope IB users enjoy the page, and I welcome comments and criticisms!

• Minor update to Instapaper Beyond (1.4)
• Instapaper Beyond for Safari!
• Instapaper Beyond: fix for text style controls

I have a few new features completed and ready to launch, actually, but I'll save them up for a bigger update. I'm also going to try to find time to build out a dedicated project page, and maybe even add a screencast. I do love making screencasts.

I'll be keeping an eye on the gallery to see when it shows up. Follow @ttscoff on Twitter if you're curious, I'm sure I'll have an excited tweet or two when it does.

• Instapaper Beyond microsite
• New Safari Extensions give good source
• Instapaper Beyond Bugs (fixed)

1. VoodooPad¹ supports column selection (hold down the option key and drag) and non-contiguous text selection. The former is a major boon in many situations, such as wanting to remove all of the spaces/tabs between a number at the beginning of lines in a list, and the first character in the list. That would make more sense if I had a picture for you, but this is a quick post and there's no time for such frivolity. Just try it. The latter is neat, but I've never really found a use for it. By holding down the Command key and dragging in areas that don't touch, you can create multiple selections and operate on them all at once. I'm sure there's a valid use case for that... I just think it's neat that it's there. I'm weird like that.
2. Python Markdown supports attributes. By placing {@class=alignright} in the alt text for an image definition, for instance, you can add class="alignright" within that element. It doesn't work very well for things like horizontal rules (messes up the parsing) or unordered lists (gets assigned to individual list items), but for paragraphs, images and other block elements, it's awesome. Markdown has become one of my favorite writing tools, so this is cool news.^{2 3}
3. When my wife⁴ is out-of-town for a week, things go to hell pretty fast. I didn't just discover that today, but I further proved it.

I'll explain why I care about the second item in an upcoming post (teaser: it's about VoodooPad, Python Markdown Extra and running a live website with VoodooPad). You may never get an explanation on the third item, but I'm sure you'll be all right with that.

Bonus discovery: Our pit bull, Emma, is totally awesome. You know you want to click here for a taste of the awesomesauce. For the last week, it's just been her, me and a crazy pit mix we're fostering named Honey, and we all still love each other.

Bonus tip: want to know a nifty way to get the direct image urls from your (or anyone's) Flickr images, despite the new Flickr design? Use getURLinfo. You just enter the url of the page after their url, and optionally add a format (xml or json) to the end as a query string: http://geturlinfo.appspot.com/http://www.flickr.com/photos/circlesixdesign/3431867259/?format=json. Works well for finding out where shortened url's go, too… if you don't like all of the options I threw out this weekend.

• A Quick VoodooPad Script Plugin — Go To Today
• MultiMarkdown in MarsEdit
• TextMate drag command for Base64 encoding images

It's a very simple little shell command which uses curl to track down the destination of a shortened url (or any link with a redirect). It works with an assortment of services, including bit.ly, tinyurl.com, ow.ly, etc. It returns the destination address (the original url), and you can pass that on to whatever you like!

Side note: I've been working on a little site called JustTheLinks which makes liberal use of url-lengthening. It grabs all of your tweets from your home timeline which contain links, and creates a live-updated list with expanded urls and titles. It uses PHP's curl to do the trick, so it's the same concept. It's "in-progress," but feel free to check it out at http://justthelinks.com!

Anyway, I decided to update the Quicksilver action and adapt it for some other uses. I'm happy to report that it's still quite useful as a command line script, a LaunchBar action or a System Service. This post has code for all three, so take your pick!

The curl command in this script has two options specified, -I and -s. -I tells it to fetch only the headers of the requested URI, and the -s tells it to suppress error messages (silent). The result is a short response which contains the location of the redirect, which is piped to awk. We look for the line in the response containing "Location" and print the second field of that line, which is the destination url. Here are a few ways I thought of to put it to use:

Terminal

The first thing I did was whip up a shell script to run from the command line. Just create a text file wherever you keep scripts², or make a new directory somewhere for it. Paste in the code below, and name it something that makes sense to you. I went with follow, because it's following the redirect path, and expand was taken (and lengthen didn't seem as much fun to type...). The script looks for a single argument, which would be the shortened url, and if it doesn't receive one it tries the clipboard. So, if you already have the url in your clipboard, which is a pretty safe bet in this case, you can just run the script with no arguments.

#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
  curl -Is `pbpaste` | awk '/Location/ { print $2 }'  
else
  curl -Is $1 | awk '/Location/ { print $2 }'
fi

LaunchBar

I heart LaunchBar. Like Quicksilver, you can easily build "actions" for it that act on different types of input. This one just acts on text you paste or send to it, and assumes it's going to be a shortened URL. After it lengthens it, it just displays the result as large popup text. If you wanted to, you could easily have it open location or whatever, but the whole point is just to see where you're going, right?

This just goes into ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar/Actions as a compiled AppleScript (scpt) file. Open AppleScript Editor and paste in the code below (or just click here to open it automatically in your editor). Save the file to the Actions folder and give it a name you'll recognize. Mine's called 'Expand Shortened URL.scpt'. Clever, I know. Here's the code:

on handle_string(message)

    tell application "LaunchBar"
        set _res to do shell script "curl -Is " & message & " | awk '/Location/ { print $2 }'"
        display in large type _res
    end tell

end handle_string

Snow Leopard Service

Lastly, here's a System Service that you can run on selected text in any Cocoa application. I've previously posted a Service for shortening urls, so here's the opposite. This one can actually take a whole block of text and will scan for any and all links in it, attempting to lengthen and replace any shortened urls in the text. Here's how to build it:

• Open Automator.app
• Select "Service" from the new file menu
• Set "Service receives selected" to "text" in "any application"
• Check the "Replaces selected text" box
• Find the "Run Shell Script" action on the left and drag it into your workflow on the right
• Set the Shell to Ruby (in this case)
• Paste in the code below
• Save the file to the ~/Library/Services folder, named something like "Expand shortened urls in selection" (or something more interesting)

Now, when you select text in any Cocoa application (Safari, Mail, TextEdit, etc.), you'll be able to find your Service in the Services submenu of either the application menu in the menubar, or in the contextual menu that comes up when you right click (ctrl-click) the selected text. When you run it, it will replace your text with a new version with any shortened urls in it expanded.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -rjcode -Ku

require 'open-uri'

input = STDIN.read
links = input.scan(/\b((?:https?:\/\/)(?:www\.)?([^\/]+)\/[a-zA-Z0-9]+[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’])/im)
links.each {|link|
  result = %x{curl -Is #{link[0]} | awk '/Location/ { print $2 }'}
  input = input.gsub(/#{link[0]}/,result.strip)
}
print input

How often will you need any of these little experiments? Probably not very often. Most of the time, I'm more than happy to just follow a shortened link and trust that the description it came with will hold true. Every once in a while, though, I come across a link of unknown origin that I'd prefer to run through something like this. Hopefully you'll be able to find a use for it, too. It's a cool little snippet.

• A System Service for to. url shortening
• Updated: Songza Lucky Link Service
• Songza Lucky Link Service

I know, it's stupid for two reasons: first, it's just not that big a deal, and second, I could just use the Emacs keybindings (^F,^B,^P,^N, etc.). Well, to that I say "phooey" on both counts. It is a big deal; I've probably lost hours of my life to that motion. As to the latter, I didn't grow up on Emacs, and those shortcuts have just never nestled into my muscle memory. In related news, I already have some of those keys bound elsewhere.

I used to use KeyRemap4Macbook to map control-j,i,l and m to the cursor keys, but haven't installed it since my last clean wipe (just in case it was part of the reason I had to do the clean wipe to begin with). I missed that convenience, though, so after 15 minutes of Googling, here's the answer...

Allan Odgaard, creator of TextMate, offers the beginning of the solution on the TextMate blog. I found a little more detailed information around the net, too. Basically, you can add or edit a file called DefaultKeyBinding.dict in ~/Library/KeyBindings/ to add the keystrokes to all Cocoa applications. Mine looks like this now:

{
  "^j" = "moveBackward:";
  "^l" = "moveForward:";
  "^m" = "moveDown:";
  "^i" = "moveUp:";
  "^E" = "\"editInTextMate:\"";
}

The first part of each pair is the keystroke, and the second part is the action. To find a list of the available actions, I just looked at /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Resources/StandardKeyBinding.dict, which has all of the default OS X keybindings in it. You'll need Property List Editor to view the file in its default state. To view the file in a text editor, you have to convert it to an XML (old school and plain text) plist. If you're curious, copy the file to your Desktop and, in Terminal, run plutil -convert xml1 ~/Desktop/StandardKeyBinding.dict.

After editing DefaultKeyBinding.dict and restarting your Cocoa apps, your new keyboard shortcuts will be available. That's when I found the next problem. TextMate has ^J mapped to "Reformat and Justify" under the Text menu. I never, ever use that command, so that was just annoying. I first tried to just override it in System Preferences->Keyboard->Application Shortcuts, but that didn't do anything. Next I found a post on macosxhints that offered a Terminal (defaults) command for changing default Application shortcuts. For example:

defaults write com.macromates.textmate NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add "Reformat and Justify" "nil"

Guess what? That didn't do it. TextMate was still pwning the ^J shortcut. Next stop, the Resources folder of the TextMate application. There I found KeyBindings.dict, where it was easy to locate the offending shortcut. I commented out the line (//) and restarted TextMate. Ta. Dum. My new keyboard shortcuts now function perfectly.

By the way, the reason I didn't use "k" for down is I actually do regularly use the kill keybinding to delete to the end of the line (as well as ^a to move to beginning and ^e to the end). Also, you might skip mapping "m" to down, as "n" right next to it is already mapped to moveDown:, as mentioned while complaining about Emacs keybindings. I have them both mapped now, so I can have lazy fingers if I want to. Further, note that these keybindings will not work when selecting text; once you press the shift key, you're in a whole new world. You'd have map those as well if you wanted that functionality.

I'm happy now, and so are my fingers. Have any other brilliant keybinding stories? I'd love to hear them.

• Updated: Songza Lucky Link Service
• Clippable to Evernote Snow Leopard Service
• Songza Lucky Link Service

I cleaned up a few loose ends, fixed some error messages, general housekeeping. However, I’m still stuck as to how to tell when a post to Instapaper fails. I’m unable to get a response code from the async post, so all I can really tell is that there was a response. I can’t tell if it was good or bad. So… the notification will pretty much always tell you it was a success. If your articles aren’t showing up in Instapaper, check your username and password in the settings and try again.

I doubt I’ll push much further on this, given that the Instapaper bookmarklet does a fine job with Google Reader, and you can trigger it with a ⌘-# if it’s in your bookmarks bar, # being the position of the bookmarklet in the bar, from 1–9.

GReader Instapaper — Adds single-keystroke sending of the current article in Google Reader to your Instapaper account. More Info

• Single-keystroke Instapaper in Google Reader
• Instapaper Beyond: fix for text style controls
• Instapaper Beyond for Safari!

If you've never created a TextMate Snippet before, read on. If you're an old pro, skip down to the code below.

Creating a TextMate Snippet

To create a Snippet in TextMate, go to Bundles->Bundle Editor->Show Bundle Editor. If you don't already have a "personal" Bundle, you should create one to keep your custom Snippets and Commands separate from other bundles. Just use the plus sign button in the bottom left and choose New Bundle, then name it with your own name (or whatever you like).

Select that bundle in the left column and use the plus sign button at the bottom again, this time choosing New Snippet. Name the new Snippet "Placeholder Image" and set the Activation to Tab Trigger and enter your preferred shortcut in the field next to it. I'm using "dummy," which is the same as my TextExpander snippet, but I have TextExpander disabled in TextMate, so it overlaps nicely.

Next, insert the following code in the main text area for the snippet...

The Placeholder Image Snippet

<img src="http://placehold.it/${1:width}x${2:height}/${3:333333}/${4:dddddd}&text=${5/ /+/g}${6:+($1x$2)}" alt="${5:Placeholder} $1x$2" width="$1" height="$2" />

Using the Placeholder Image Snippet

Snippets in TextMate don't save until you select another one or close the Bundle Editor, so change your sidebar selection before you try it out. You should be able to create or edit any HTML or PHP file now, and type your shortcut, followed by a tab, and get a placeholder image. After it's inserted, you can tab through and change the attributes.

This Snippet gives you a full image tag with tab stops¹ for width, height, background color, foreground color and title text. The title text is entered in the alt attribute, and mirrored into the query string so that you can just type alphanumeric characters with natural spaces and it will substitute the necessary plus signs in the mirrored version. The width and height are included as mirrors in the title, but you can delete that in the final tab stop.

• Instant placeholder images with TextExpander
• A TextMate Command for fast abbr tags
• An ode to Twilight, and a TextMate tip

Just create a new plain text snippet, title it "Placeholder Image," give it whatever shortcut makes sense to you, and then add this code:

<img src="http://placehold.it/%fill:width%x%fill:height%/333333/dddddd&text=%fill:title%" alt="%fill:title%" width="%fill:width%" height="%fill:height%" />

It uses TextExpander 3's Fill feature to get the width, height and title from you before it inserts the image tag. If you have multiple words in your title, use plus signs (+) instead of spaces (url encoded). I'll be turning this into a TextMate snippet soon, too, and I'll post that when I have another minute. I'd love to hear about any other great tools you're using!

• Placeholder image TextMate Snippet
• TextExpander experiments
• A TextMate Command for fast abbr tags

This is just a quick pointer to an icon I whipped up this evening for HootSuite. I thought I’d share it in case anyone else found the default icon packed with the Fluid SSB download (available here) unsatisfactory. Their icon is too big and looks awkward in my Dock, so I trimmed it down and vectorized the owl to clean up the lines a bit.

If you haven’t tried HootSuite, it’s a great social media client with a layout similar to TweetDeck. It lacks some of the features that TweetDeck has, but not too many, and it has the benefit of not crashing. Over. And over. Check it out for all your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, etc. needs.

Here you go: HootSuite Icon Revised

• Antique Safari Reader hack update with Evernote goodness
• Instapaper Beyond for Fluid.app
• Single-keystroke Instapaper in Google Reader

I do my best never to write blatantly drug-related lyrics. I try to use metaphor and a little imagination to create imagery which people who have "been there" can relate to, while still being meaningful to those who don't have such self-destructive proclivities. This is an older song of mine, and marks the beginning of this lyrical "rule" for me. I may not have nailed it, but I think it was a good start.

The guitar in this song is the first acoustic I picked up when I started this new leg of my life, and its sound is far from beautiful. The bass is a dumpster find from my punk rock days, recorded through a direct box, and has a sound I would call "trashy," if you'll excuse the pun. All told, though, I rather like the final product, and hope you do, too.

I'm posting the lyrics after the player, as this is an older recording and I don't think my mix on the vocals was optimal for making out all of the words. I'm going to go back and add lyrics to the others in this series as well, when I get a chance.

Continue to the post to hear Blue Bags…

Blue Bags

He said "I've got the blue bags with the red letters, and
You can look away but don't you ever tell me never,
for a buck and a quarter, man, I'll do you better,
you can walk away but don't you ever tell me never"

And I know... I think my brain is trying to kill me

And in the blue bags with the red letters I found her
Her skin was brown I pulled her down I tried to drown her
I gave her a single lonely red rose before I took her in
And now she's dancing in my veins

I can't restrain
I can't refrain
I can't refrain from pain
I think my brain is trying to kill me

And in the blue bags with the red letters I gave in
It's dark in here it smells like death and it feels like heaven
And here I am now waiting, waiting on the corner again
Waiting for those blue bags and everything's forgiven

Because that's the world we're living in
And every day we're giving in
We wallow in and dying in
I think my brain is trying to kill me

I gave her a red rose every time I saw her
She drags me down she bleeds me dry and still I call her
And in a blue sea on a red ship I saw her
Sailing for my heart

On a red ship in a blue sea
Can't remember why I feel this need
I only know what's plain to see
I think my brain is trying to kill me

And on a blue arm in red letters still drying
We wrote a song about freedom and dying
Because some of us find freedom and some of us find death
And some of us, we have to steal our own last breath

Because some of us we find our way out, some of us die trying
These are the words she breathed to me as she lay dying
She said, I'm drowning in blue bags with red letters
I'm drowning in blue bags with red letters
I'm drowing, I'm drowing...

• Sad songs, part 2: Junky Angel
• And now… something happier
• Sad music for happy people, part 1

Click below to download, unzip the extension and double click it to install. Head for Preferences->Extensions and set up your Instapaper username and password, and pick a hotkey. The default hotkey is "i", which doesn't interfere with existing Google shortcuts. Tailor to taste.

The only issue I'm having right now is that it doesn't fail properly if you have an incorrect user/pass combination. It tells you it succeeded, but doesn't post to your account. I'll have to add a verification step at some point in the process. For now, if things aren't showing up in Instapaper for you, check your username and password in the Extensions preferences. Be sure to check out Instapaper Beyond, too!

Download:

GReader Instapaper - Adds single-keystroke sending of the current article in Google Reader to your Instapaper account. More Info

• GReader Instapaper 0.2
• Instapaper Beyond for Safari!
• Instapaper Beyond: fix for text style controls

This release includes:

• Alphabetical sorting of the help HUD (A-Z,a-z)
• Edit a bookmark with “E” (Shift-E)
  • you can tab through the fields and submit with Enter, returning you to your listing
• Scroll animation when navigating bookmark lists
  • makes it more obvious which direction the page just scrolled you in when selecting a bookmark partially or entirely offscreen.

Download:

Instapaper Beyond for Safari 5 — Instapaper Beyond for Safari adds full keyboard navigation and Ajax loading of text views to Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com). This extension is for Safari 5 with extensions enabled. More Info

• Instapaper Beyond: fix for text style controls
• Instapaper Beyond 1.8.7
• Instapaper Beyond 1.3