Facebook Posts via IFTTT to Google Drive to DevonThink

DEVONthink Tips
1

Hi there,

I am just getting started with DTPO and still using the trials to see, if this software helps me in my daily routines. I am currently confronted with following idea:

When I see an interesting post or link on Facebook, I post it on a personal and private page of mine. From there I have used IFTTT to read the posts and put them into a google drive document, where I listed all those links and posts to read them later.

Now, I would like to extend this workflow to DTPO and find every single link there in my inbox. How do I achieve this? Is there any way to maybe read out the google drive document and create new notes in DT for each entry? Or does maybe a workflow or clipper exists for this kind of task?

Thanks in advance for your help and comments.

Best,
Paul

2

and

Please define “a Google Drive document” and what a “note” in DEVONthink is. There is more than one type for both, and they are important details to know. Thanks!

3

I import all my data into a google drive spreadsheet.

Well, here I am kind of a newbie. Best would be probably to have webarchives of the links or at least bookmarks. Thats my idea.

Best and thanks,
Paul

4

Have you checked out the browser extension for clipping? (Not sure exactly what you’re doing, but may apply). Also Bookmarklets.

I don’t use IFTTT but instead of sending data to a Google spreadsheet (though I suppose you can continue to do that too, if you wish), you should look at our URL commands (in the built-in Help or manual: devontechnologies.com/downlo … nuals.html).

Here’s an example…
x-devonthink://createWebarchive?title=test&location=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FPickled_cucumber&destination=83007ECD-72DC-480F-98D0-B81EE00ECCDC

Note: Webarchives are not always capable of being captured correctly.

Note 2: The destination here points to a specific group in a specific database. You can get such a link by right-clicking and choosing Copy Item Link and stripping the x-devonthink:// from the URL. If you don’t specify a destination, the output will go to whatever location is chosen in DEVONthink’s Preferences > Import > Destination.

5

Thanks for the input.

Actually, I thought of another way and hope that there is a way to do that with DevonThink.

Since I already have a huge spreadsheet with many links (created via IFTTT), I would like to (automatically) import this spreadsheet into DTPO. Is there any way to accomplish this?

If yes, than I would use my regular workflow with IFTTT and would just use an automatic import of new entries in the spreadsheet in DTPO.

Thanks for the help,
Best, Paul

6

Import “automatically”, no. You could bookmark the spreadsheet and access it in DEVONthink (since it has web browsing capabilities), but DEVONthink is not indexing that data.

Would it be possible to process some of that data? Possible, but non-trivial.

7

There are two other options available to you too.

You could setup Google Drive to sync to your local machine. That should take the files along too. If you use IFTTT to convert that to an Excel or CSV, that may help long term.

What I would do at that point is one of two things depending on your needs:

  1. Index the folder in DevonThink. I currently do that with OneDrive to pull in some documents. It works reasonably well, but may not work for the google spreadsheet version.

  2. Write some applescript. If you are putting links into that document, and want to download a web archive for that, Applescript should get you there. DevonThink has a hook that can accept a “clip to” essentially. It’s like you were opening each one individually in a browser, and clipping. I’m going to work on something similar for Visual Studio Online, if you’re curious how I approach it, ping here and I’ll share the script when I finish.