Can my workflow be improved?

DEVONthink Tips
1

Hi all,

The following has been my workflow for quite some time, so it works for me and I’m reasonably quick with it. However, in need a New Year’s resolution I decided that perhaps it can be improved. Would appreciated any advice, tips or scripts!

  1. Identifying news item from feed, using NetNewsWire.

  2. New tab is opened, revealing the entire news item (let’s say, for argument’s sake, that they truncate their news feed, thus you have to actually go to their site to view the entire news story). So, I’m looking at a new tab in NNW with the full news story.

  3. I hightlight the news story, and then SHIFT+COMMAND+\ to invoke scripts in my menu bar. That key combo is assigned to “Show Help Menu” in my keyboard shortcuts (under System Preferences), but I’ve told Apple Script Utility to “Show script menu in menu bar”. I’ve then positioned that Script Menu all the way to the left, so that when this keyboard shortcut is invoked, that’s what gets highlight. I digress…

  4. After invoking the scripts menu in my menu bar, I select “Copy selection to…” which is provided with, in my case, DTPO. This brings up a dialogue box asking me where, in DTPO, I would like to save this text selection.

  5. The location is selected and I am brought back into NNW; actually, back to the original tab with the news story from which I selected the text. This is handy, because…

  6. I then copy the URL of the news item, go back to DTPO where the text was just copied, and paste in the URL. I need the URL because, as an academic, I need just in case I reference in a paper/article I am writing.

That last step is where I’m wondering if there is a more efficient way of doing things. I could just capture web archives left and right, but they are significantly larger in size.

I suppose what I am after is an automated way of bringing over text and the URL at the same time, but not as a web archive.

Anyway, would love to hear how others do this.

Happy New Year!

David

2

One suggestion that I have, a question really, is why are you not using the Services menu “Take Rich Note” with “Command-)”? It captures the selection as Rich Text and includes the URL to the original article. This method, and its complementary command of “Append Rich Note” is by far my most common means of getting online data into DTP. The downside for some is that it goes to the Inbox only, but I’d rather capture first and organize later. Another suggestion is to look at FastScripts to greatly improve access to scripts on your system. I use the full, paid-for, version but there is also a lite version available for free.

3

Greg: thanks for that. I remember that procedure from v1.X, actually. Quite slick.

Problem: the URL that gets copied is, as far as I can tell, impossible to copy from the DTPO location bar. If I click on it, it launches the default browser (DevonAGENT, actually). In one sense, this is fine because I can cut the URL from the location bar in DA. However, if that URL ever goes dead I have no easy way of capturing the original URL from DTPO.

Unless I’m missing something?

4

If you use the “Show Info” pane in DTP, the URL appears in a box where you can copy it, edit it, even select it and drag it into the body of document itself.

5

That’ll do nicely. Thanks Greg.