Bike and outliners with M.b
Blogging and outlining share a long history together. Userland’s Clay Basket could create a full static site from an outline. NetNewsWire 1.0 had a built-in outliner for notes and blog publishing that would later be spun out as MarsEdit.
Recently there have been new outliners that work with Micro.blog. I blogged about publishing to Micro.blog via Dave Winer’s Drummer. Maurice Parker wrote about his Zavala outliner and integrating it with Micro.blog via Shortcuts.
Bike is a new Mac outliner from Jesse Grosjean of Hog Bay Software. It has a clean interface that feels closer to a text editor than most outliners, and it can save as OPML and plain text. I’m also fascinated that the native .bike file format is just HTML.
I wired up publishing from Bike to Micro.blog with Maurice’s Humboldt that provides Shortcuts for Micro.blog. It looks like Bike has great AppleScript support. You can iterate over the rows in an outline, or you can just grab the contents as HTML like this:
tell application "Bike"
set doc to front document
export doc as bike format
end tell
Note that the export command requires a paid Bike license.
You can download my test shortcut here. It’s a little hacky. It strips out the HTML header/footer with a simple find-and-replace in Shortcuts. It will need a little more work if you want to clean up the outline and publish real blog posts with it.
