Filing from iOS - Looking for ideas

[alex]

Hi all,

I consume a lot of content on my iOS devices. While there are different apps and formats I'm using, I'll keep this request for ideas focused on content displayed in the browser (web pages, PDFs, etc) -- basically something that has a public URI.

Sometimes I feel like archiving the piece I've just read into EF. But being on the iOS device I don't seem to find an easy way to do it. So, I'm wondering if others have been having a similar need and what solutions are they using to address it.

I've been thinking about different approaches, but before starting to implement one, I'd definitely appreciate ideas from long time EF users.

tia,

A://

[towb]

I use Instapaper to save the pages and move them into EF the next time I'm at the computer. You could automate that.

[Michael Tsai]

I use Instapaper to save the pages and move them into EF the next time I'm at the computer. You could automate that.

You can use this script to automate importing from Instapaper to EagleFiler.

[alex]

Thanks for the suggestions. It is close to the system I've been thinking of. I'll briefly describe it here so others could use it:

1. Use a custom tag on Pinboard (e.g. @import-ef)
2. Use a custom set of tags to indicate the type of import (e.g. @pdf, @webarchive, etc.)
3. Pinboard offers a simple API that can be used to retrieve bookmarks given a tag
4. Based on the type of import, coordinate imports in EF
5. Once a bookmark is imported delete the bookmark

Notes:

i/ the rest of the tags of a bookmark can be used as tags for the entry
ii/ the note for a bookmark can be used for the entry note

The Pinboard API is returning XML and even if I did quite a bit of AppleScript, I'm not sure I'll want to do this with AS, so the main part will be in Python. But for creating EF entries, I already have some advanced AS so all I'll have to figure out is how to pass parameters between the two scripts.

Thanks a lot,

A://

[alex]

You can use this script to automate importing from Instapaper to EagleFiler.

Thanks Michael. I already have some smart AppleScripts for working with EF. I'll bypass using NNW as I don't have it on my system and I like to keep things involving as few tools as possible.

[Michael Tsai]

The Pinboard API is returning XML and even if I did quite a bit of AppleScript, I'm not sure I'll want to do this with AS, so the main part will be in Python. But for creating EF entries, I already have some advanced AS so all I'll have to figure out is how to pass parameters between the two scripts.

It sounds like you’d want to use a custom script, since you want different pages to be imported in different formats, but other users might be interested in using the Import Bookmarks… command to import from Pinboard. EagleFiler will read the XML file directly and import the tags, etc.

[thoresson]

alex, did you ever get this system up and running?

[alex]

alex, did you ever get this system up and running?

Yes, I have this working for quite some time. Here's how I do it:

1. bookmark the page on Pinboard; you can use any other online bookmarking systems that give you a) a bookmarklet; b) an API to access your bookmarks
2. when bookmarking a page that I want to get into my EagleFiler archive, in addition of the normal tags, I use a couple that provide details about how the bookmark will be imported into EagleFiler:
1. zzarchive: a bookmark that should be imported into EF
2. zzpdf: import as pdf
3. zzquote: import only the text selection and the link
4. zzkeep: after importing the bookmark, preserve it in the bookmark system
5. a couple of other more esoteric options
3. on one of my machine I have a cron job triggering a custom AppleScript every couple of hours that is fetching all bookmarks tagged with zzarchive. Based on the "meta-tags" the script nows how to import the bookmark into EF

This has been working reliably since I've set it up and I'm quite happy with the setup.