Automating AutoBlogger
I started out trying to write a post. Failed.
So I worked on writing a post analyzing my failure.
Failed
Actually, not exactly.
Writing is thinking. I thought a lot about why I had failed. And at last understood why I hadn’t finished the first post, or the second, and many others.
So that was a win.
Why I failed
I had an idea but didn’t have a clear picture of what I wanted to write. So I kept on writing thing after thing, exploring the space, hoping I would find the answer.
I didn’t check to see if I was on track—which would have been hard since I had no track: only a destination, and no road to get there.
I thought some more and looked for other things that often went wrong. Like starting to write something, but not having enough intention to persevere.
I decided that a checklist would help me. So I designed one.
Then I realized that this was not the first time I’d written a blog post complaining about not writing and analyzing my failure to write.
So I went an found the earlier ones I’d written.
Holy crap!
Failure -> learning; learning -> forgetting
I looked back over the many posts I’ve written about my blogging failures. Each one captured a bit of wisdom.
I’d learned from my mistakes. Yay!
Each post had a bit of wisdom, hard-won. And then forgotten.
Or forgotten by my meat brain. But I’m a cyborg. I’d retained the memory in my cyber brain.
Limitations of meat
My meat brain is limited. And aging is making it worse.
But my cyber-brain is—for all practical purposes—unlimited. And technology is making it better.
I’d improved my writing process by picking suitable new technologies and putting them together into a workflow. So why not make that better?
Why not automate more of my writing process.?
And then, I thought: why just writing? I’ve got lots of things that I’ve learned, practiced, and then forgotten. The tools for automating them are at hand. I can learn them.
And then I thought: why not even further automate waking up?
So I started coding something.
And that put me in discovery mode. I discovered a whole new generation of coding tools and techniques that have emerged since the last time I played programmer—just a few years ago.
Down the technology rabbit hole I went. I disappeared for more than a week.
Now I’m back, with a lot of problems solved, a backlog of posts to write, and burning desire to increase my productivity and to use the available technology to overcome some of my biological deficiencies.
AutoBlogger improved
The last time I dove into my blogging workflow, I wrote Authoring, improved, which was an improvement over High productivity blogging workflow. Right? Sure.
Some things stuck. And some things deteriorated. In particular, I lost my ability to use Google voice typing to write drafts.
So here’s Rev 1 of the better process:
I click a button that will:
Open a tab with a new document—a copy of my blogging template document—and put it into my Google Docs BlogDraft folder
Open a tab with StackEdit
Open a tab with Grammarly
Open a tab with a new post page in Blogger
That would be a great start.
So I built it.
And here’s a video of how it works.
Transcription workflow
Next: When I’m writing a post, I sometimes want to pull quotes from a YouTube video and put them in the post.
Here is the workflow that I have used and that I’m going to automate next.
I made a video of the procedure.
I start with three tabs open: the YouTube video, one for the conversion program (I’m using one called Online Video Converter and one for the transcription program (I’m using otter.ai).
I start in the YouTube tab and select the URL.
I go to the conversion tab and paste it in the conversion program. Then choose format. I’m using mp3. I click and wait. Then click download and it.
Now I go to the Otter tab and import it. And after a while, I have my transcript.
So I used the same programming technique to open the video converter and the transcription program tabs and carry out the rest of the procedure manually. For now, at least.
I’ll post a video of the improved tool, later.
Programming workflow
That’s going to be my next deep dive.
The plan is:
Describe each technology that I am using with plusses and minuses
Put together a workflow description
Solve each problem that I find