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December 04, 2005
LazyWeb URL Print Spooler Automator workflow and app
Matt asked for “…a site/script/widget/thing that would grab the URLs of what I have tagged “to_read” (or an arbitrary tag, of course), goes and gets the text found at those URLs (this doesn’t have to be pretty), then smooshes them together into a file I can then print or save…”
It was pretty simple to put that together as an Automator workflow, which I prefer to the command-line stuff that someone else suggested.
My version prompts for a complete URL such as “http://del.icio.us/heyotwell/toread”, follows those tagged links, and makes a text file out of whatever it finds.
It’s fairly fragile:
- it prefers that you’re downloading links you’ve made at del.icio.us (read: it sloppily doesn’t check for you trying it from a non-del.icio.us URL).
- don’t pound it with a page full of lots of links, try fetching four or five.
- the resulting text file’s not guaranteed to be too readable. (Is there a way to format text with Automator?)
Here it is: ReadSomethingGood (.zip file), an OS X Automator workflow and double-clickable application for downloading your “to-reads” into a single text file.
Posted by Andrew at December 4, 2005 06:41 PM