Manton Reece

Last week I took an Amtrak train out to Los Angeles. I decided not to blog about the trip until I was back home, so that I could mostly unplug and focus on editing my book Indie Microblogging. Now that I’m back, I’m going to share a quick recap and some photos.

I used Swarm along the way to capture check-ins at train stations, restaurants, and other landmarks. Those are published with map thumbnails over at manton.coffee. I’d like to do more with this site, filling in check-in history and eventually moving it away from Swarm.

It’s unusual for me to be away from home so long. In recent years for conferences I’ve been flying out for only a few days and then back. The solo train ride was like stepping back in time. A much slower pace, no wi-fi, and inconsistent cell coverage.

I arrived in LA very early, just before 5am. Opted to pay a little extra 💰 to check in to my hotel early, had breakfast at a nearby coffee shop, then rented a car. Driving around LA in traffic is its own story, which I talked about on Core Intuition 489.

The trip centered around catching a Spurs game with Jon at Staples Center as we attempt to visit all the NBA arenas. Choosing the train instead of flying ensured the trip was a break from the everyday routine, giving me time to focus on writing. It was also great to explore the city, checking out coffee shops, the library downtown (I had just read The Library Book about the LA library fire), tacos in Santa Monica, the view from Griffith Observatory, a quick drive-by of Disney Animation, Angels Flight Railway, and lunch in Koreatown.

I got used to the little quirks about train travel. Eating in the dining car. Settling into my sleeper car roomette. Watching the landscape roll by, changing so slowly it almost didn’t seem to change at all for hours. Then I’d look up from work and New Mexico had faded into west Texas and I was nearly home. Feeling very lucky that I was able to do a trip like this.

On the latest Core Intuition, Daniel and I talk about the just-released FastScripts 3, his app for quickly running scripts. He mentioned that even though AppleScript hasn’t had any attention in years, it’s still useful as a complement to Shortcuts and other workflows. Daniel said:

It’s like learning a little bit of French when you go to France. You don’t have to do it, but you’re going to have such an easier time if you do. And in my opinion, learning — even now, even in its state of relative neglect — learning a little bit of AppleScript on the Mac is like learning a little bit of French in France. You’re going to get a lot farther with everything you want to do.

Micro.blog doesn’t have AppleScript support, but it does have a URL scheme for starting a new blog post. For example, I wrote the AppleScript below to play around with FastScripts 3. You could trigger it with a keyboard shortcut from FastScripts to start a new blog post using a link for an open Safari tab.

-- we'll need access to AppKit for NSString's URL encoding
use framework "Foundation"
use scripting additions

-- global variables that we'll set later
set the_url to ""
set the_title to ""

-- helper function to URL-encode the text we'll pass to Micro.blog
on urlEncode(input)
	tell current application's NSString to set raw_url to stringWithString_(input)
	set the_encoded_url to raw_url's stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:4 -- 4 is NSUTF8StringEncoding
	return the_encoded_url as Unicode text
end urlEncode

-- ask Safari for the current tab's URL and page title
tell application "Safari"
	set the_url to URL of current tab of window 1
	set the_title to name of current tab of window 1
end tell

-- make a Markdown string like [title](url)
set s to "[" & the_title & "](" & the_url & ")"
set the_mb_url to "microblog://post?text=" & urlEncode(s)

-- start a new post with Micro.blog for Mac
open location the_mb_url

My AppleScript knowledge is very rusty, and it took more than a few web searches to cobble this together, mostly because of the URL encoding. Now that it’s working it could be the basis for other automation with Micro.blog.