I am trying to automate a process that I do so often it is beginning to eat up a non-insignificant chunk of time, and I’m having trouble solving the puzzle.
Setting: I currently use Instapaper as my reading “basecamp” and once I have read an article I export it to Pinboard, a process that includes tagging.
Where things get messy: After the article has been exported I then go to the web page of the article and use the “Clip to DEVONthink” extension for Chrome to make a single page PDF that is a record of the article, frozen in time from the time I read it. I do this because, despite paying for Pinboard to archive each article, I want to harness the power of DTPro in my research. After I do this I then archive the article on Instapaper and go to DTPro where I rename the article and tag it with the same tags I used for Pinboard.
What a solution would look like: Ideally, I want to only export from Instapaper to Pinboard, a process that includes tagging, then archive the article in Instapaper. The rest I would like to automate as much as possible. Here’s a (broken) solution to the problem - the problem steps are in red.
Broken solution:
Step 1: Monitor RSS feed of new Pinboard items.
Step 2: Convert new RSS items to single page PDF a la “Clip to DEVONthink” extension while maintaining Pinboard tags and place them into Dropbox “Basket” folder.
The following steps will be accomplished with Hazel
Step 3: Rename all .pdf files in “Basket” to UNNAMED_filedate.pdf and append tag “Articles”
Step 4: Move all files beginning w/ UNNAMED_ to folder “To be named”
As I have time I will go and manually rename the articles based on my naming convention - this cannot be automated.
Step 5: All .pdf files in folder “To be named” that do not begin with UNNAMED_ move to folder “Articles”
Step 6: DTPro indexes folder “Articles”
Any help with this is much appreciated. I have used the Pinboard import script successfully, but I can’t determine how the script would help me maintain an indexed folder of PDFs outside of DTPro, which is something I would like to have with this new workflow. Apart from the fact that I’m not sure how to automate converting the RSS feed that is part of the Pinboard script into PDFs, I would prefer the PDFs not be held within the DTPro database.