{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "Shortcuts on Jamie Thingelstad", "icon": "https://avatars.micro.blog/avatars/2025/14/1545.jpg", "home_page_url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/", "feed_url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/feed.json", "items": [ { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/09/30/i-created-a.html", "content_html": "

I created a Shortcuts Collection page to connect various blog posts I’ve written about Shortcuts and how I use them. Few posts so far, but thinking this is a topic I will write about more since I do so much with it.

\n", "date_published": "2023-09-30T08:54:33-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/09/30/i-created-a.html", "tags": ["Productivity","Shortcuts"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/09/30/launch-apps-shortcut.html", "title": "Launch Apps Shortcut", "content_html": "

I’m a big fan of Shortcuts and find it useful for many small automation tasks, creating one off scripts really fast, and even building complex solutions like the Weekly Thing.

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“Launch Apps” is a shortcut that I think every Mac user can benefit from. I have a set of applications that I always use. Mail, Calendar, Drafts, etc. Some apps I add contextually based on which computer I’m on, or what network. Launch Apps gives me one shortcut I can put in my Menubar and easily get everything that I want running quickly.

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You can grab my Launch Apps Shortcut as a starting point to make your own. It is a very simple shortcut, and a great way to get started with automation.

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This post is part of the Shortcuts Collection.

\n", "date_published": "2023-09-30T08:12:01-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/09/30/launch-apps-shortcut.html", "tags": ["Productivity","Apple","Shortcuts"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/09/24/how-i-build.html", "title": "How I Build the Weekly Thing", "content_html": "

One of the common questions I’m asked is how I create the Weekly Thing. There are two flavors of this question. One is about finding content and writing, and the other is about the technical act of producing each issue. This article is an attempt to answer the second question about producing each issue.

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I just finished a big revamp of the automation that I use to build each issue of the Weekly Thing so it feels like a good time to document and share how it works. I’m very happy with how this is working now, and have used automation to achieve two goals.

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  1. Remove as much of the fiddly bits around formatting and connecting systems as possible, leaving my time for the creative part of writing and sharing.
    2. \n
  2. Allow some sections to be authored ahead of time, so I can create in small chunks of time.
    3. \n
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The revamp had some additional goals, or things to fix that I badly needed to address.

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  1. It should run on any platform. Some of my steps required software that only worked on iOS so I oddly couldn’t run my automation on my Mac.
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  2. No Python scripts, all native Shortcuts. I had some steps that involved Python and that was harder to maintain and change.
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  3. Durability, better error handling, and logging. When my automation didn’t work it was hard to know why. Not good when your on deadline!
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  4. Automation for all sections. For 6 years the photo section has never been supported with automation.
    5. \n
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I’m happy to report that my new automation does all of the above, and even pulls in an additional big feature of reducing image sizes.

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Overall Solution

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Let’s start with an overall view of the whole process. This diagram shows how the various parts are connected. Green boxes are Shortcuts, and grey boxes are Apps or Services. The people represent where I author and interact to create content. This isn’t 100% of everything, but covers the important parts.

\n\"Flowchart\n

The easiest way to think of this is that the Build Issue shortcut has a list of other Shortcuts. It iterates through that list calling each shortcut. Those shortcuts in turn return a block of Markdown text. Once all shortcuts have been called, they are then combined into one Markdown block for final review and editing.

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This approach is fundamentally the same as I have used since 2017. The biggest change since then is I call many more Shortcuts, and back then I pulled HTML since MailChimp required that.

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The huge change that I’ve been making is that each section Shortcut is much more durable, and uses Data Jar to cache and manage data.

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Software Manifest

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Core technologies that are used for this include.

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Shortcuts is where the majority of the work for this occurs and here is my current set.

\n\"Apple\n

The “Build Issue” Shortcut is the one that collects markdown from all the sections and assembles it. You will see a lot of “Section:Name” shortcuts, those are the ones that are responsible for returning a section. Mostly the names make sense for a number of other utility shortcuts.

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Data Jar

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The other very important component is Data Jar, which you can think of like a database or cache for Shortcuts. Data Jar is a game changer for Shortcuts as it allows you to share and keep state between various Shortcuts. Here is what the Data Jar dictionary for issue 262 looks like.

\n\"Craft\n

As much as possible the section Shortcuts use Data Jar to store anything they need. I’ll use a simple example with Section:Fortune. Each issue of the Weekly Thing has a Fortune that I set. The basic flow is:

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  1. See if “Weekly Thing.«Current Issue».Fortune” exists in Data Jar, if it does return markdown and you are done.
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  2. If “Weekly Thing.«Current Issue».Fortune” does not exist present random Fortunes to user until one is selected.
    3. \n
  3. Once Fortune is selected, store it at “Weekly Thing.«Current Issue».Fortune” and return markdown.
    4. \n
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By using this approach I can run this anytime I want to get that section final, and when I build it at publishing time it will not require any input from me. This makes things very durable as well since I can re-run the automation easily.

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Summary

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One of the takeaways I hope you have from reading this is that while Shortcuts seem pretty trivial, you can assemble them in interesting way with additional software to create very powerful solutions. Especially with add-ons like Data Jar and S3 Files you can do some incredible stuff.

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I also think this is a good example of how you can apply automation to personal workflows. I try to use as much automation as possible to remove mundane components from my week. It is worth investing the time in Shortcuts or similar tools to see where you might personally benefit.

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See discussion on Weekly Thing Forum.

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This post is part of the Shortcuts Collection.

\n", "date_published": "2023-09-24T09:03:02-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/09/24/how-i-build.html", "tags": ["Weekly Thing","Productivity","Blogging","Shortcuts"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/09/23/smaller-images-for.html", "title": "Smaller Images for Weekly Thing", "content_html": "

In the Journal section of the Weekly Thing I include any blog posts that I’ve made for that week. To keep things easy, I’ve always just linked to the same image files that are used on my blog. That has never been ideal since those images are much larger than what you would ideally include in an email.

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I decided to try and solve this problem in Shortcuts and the amazing S3 Files. The basic approach I take to getting blog posts into the Weekly Thing is:

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  1. Retrieve the RSS feed for www.thingelstad.com
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  2. Find items in feed that are within the time period of this issue
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  3. Convert each post to markdown and do some post processing to make it work in the newsletter better
    4. \n
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To do this I would add another step after 3 to detect my own images in the posts, and do the following:

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  1. Detect any URL’s that are uploads into my blog, and make sure to not grab any others.
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  2. Retrieve the image file at that URL
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  3. Resize it to 1,200 pixels on the “long edge”
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  4. Add to S3 bucket for files.thingelstad.com in the right directory for this issue
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  5. Replace the original image URL with the new URL
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It wasn’t too hard to make all this work. After tweaking the regular expressions, and making sure that the replacement worked right it was working great.

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Here is a snippet from my logs.

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When I ran this to the Journal images in Weekly Thing 262 it was able to resize 28 images from an original size of 43 MB to 12 MB, saving 31 MB of download data!

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This is a big win in two ways. First, when you open the Weekly Thing from 263 on your device will download way less data and need to use way less memory. Also, some email services apparently dislike it if emails reference images that are longer than 1,200 pixels on the longest side. Hopefully this little efficiency will also get finicky mail servers to be nicer to my emails.

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This was only possible with the revamp I’ve been doing to my automation, and the ability to add this step in was a great result of those changes.

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This post is part of the Shortcuts Collection.

\n", "date_published": "2023-09-23T17:35:01-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/09/23/smaller-images-for.html", "tags": ["Kubb","Weekly Thing","Productivity","Blogging","Shortcuts"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2023/05/21/my-qr-codes.html", "title": "My QR Codes", "content_html": "

At Bitcoin 2023 we were talking with some folks from New York at our table while enjoying some Cuban chicken and rice. At the end of the conversation one of the guys showed everyone his phone with a QR code for his LinkedIn profile so we could connect. Everyone loved it — very easy.

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I’d like to be able to do that, and I know Shortcuts makes it very easy to do. So I whipped up My QR Codes. Tap on that and it should allow you to add that to Shortcuts. The shortcut is very simple, and you will want to modify the Dictionary at the very top with your own list of links and names.

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After you have customized it, add it to your Home Screen using the share function and you have a super simple way to share your most common links with people.

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This post is part of the Shortcuts Collection.

\n", "date_published": "2023-05-21T09:07:33-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2023/05/21/my-qr-codes.html", "tags": ["Travel","Technology","Apple","Shortcuts","Bitcoin 2023"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2021/11/22/four-thousand-weeks.html", "title": "Four Thousand Weeks as Rings", "content_html": "

I’ve been reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. The title comes from the fact that if you live to be 80, you’ll have had about 4,000 weeks. Technically it is 4,174 but that wouldn’t make a very good title for the book.

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I’m still just in the beginning of the book but as I pondered his focus on the finitude of our time, I couldn’t help but think of how to visualize this! I knew Shortcuts could do the math for me, and then I realized Charty could do the visualization.

\n\"Concentric\n\n

It strikes me as an interesting visualization. Something to ponder. 🤔

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However, I showed it to my family and they didn’t care for it much at all. The common theme seemed to be that “filling ones rings” is seen as a goal, something to look forward to, and filling these rings didn’t seem like a thing to look forward to. 😇

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This post is part of the Shortcuts Collection.

\n", "date_published": "2021-11-22T18:29:31-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2021/11/22/four-thousand-weeks.html", "tags": ["Productivity","Books","Shortcuts"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2020/04/21/using-api-credentials.html", "title": "Using API Credentials in Shortcuts", "content_html": "

Shortcuts on iOS can do incredibly powerful things, and with a little bit of extra magic you can connect to most API’s as well. Pulling data from API’s, manipulating it, and extending your shortcuts is really powerful. However, you need to have a good way to manage the authentication tokens and secrets for those APIs.

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Most Shortcuts I have seen use a Text variable and put the token in that variable. It’s then used throughout the Shortcut. This works, but it exposes problems if you share that Shortcut. It also has issues if you use the same API in multiple Shortcuts. You are now copying that token in numerous places.

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Another approach that I prefer is to create Shortcuts that do nothing but return those tokens. You can then call those Shortcuts from another Shortcut to get the token. I prefix these Shortcuts with the prefix “Secret”.

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Then when I need to use an token for an API I call the Shortcut and then reference the magic variable returned from it. You can even hide the execution of that second Shortcut.

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In addition to reuse, you also get other benefits from this approach. Your Secret Shortcut can have some logic. For example, I access Working Copy from Shortcuts and it does so with a local URL call, protected with a random key. That key is specific to each iOS device. So, rather than try to synchronize the keys I have the Secret shortcut return whatever key is right for the device that is running.

\n\"iOS\n

I do a similar thing with MailChimp’s API token that requires some encoding be applied to it.

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I find this a better way to manage these secret tokens, get reuse, and make it easier to change them. 👍

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This post is part of the Shortcuts Collection.

\n", "date_published": "2019-01-22T00:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2020/04/21/using-api-credentials.html", "tags": ["Productivity","Privacy \u0026 Security","Apple","Shortcuts"] }, { "id": "http://jthingelstad.micro.blog/2017/06/23/assembling-the-weekly.html", "title": "Assembling the Weekly Thing", "content_html": "

I had been interested in creating a newsletter like the Weekly Thing for a while but I was worried it would be difficult to do and quickly turn into a chore. I wasn’t worried about the email part, I knew a service like TinyLetter could deal with that. The daunting part was getting the content structured the right way, even when I the bits of the content were mostly in other systems already.

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I knew the main item I wanted to build it around were links to other sites that I use Pinboard to collect. But how to make that easy?

\n\"Six\n

Workflow to the Rescue

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As I thought about this I tried a number of options. I tried making an Automator workflow but that was weird, and even worse it meant I had to be on a Mac and I knew I would want to send this when I wasn’t near a computer. I started to look at Workflow and realized it might do the trick.

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Workflow has a great feature to retrieve published metadata, such as description and date, from a URL (Get Article from Web Page). Sometimes when I stored URL’s I didn’t write a description so that would be nice. I pulled the data using Pinboard’s RSS feed, put it in a loop getting a variety of data and assembling the draft content as I watched. Voila! 👏

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The entire process that I use to create Weekly Thing is based on RSS (mostly) and tied together with Workflow on iOS. I have a collection of workflows that I run, with one master workflow that kicks everything off. The master workflow is responsible for ordering the sections and setting the cutoff date for content, which in my case is midnight of the relevant Saturday. The master workflow spawns the other workflows for each content section, passing into it the cutoff date for content.

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Each workflow is then free to do whatever it wants as long as it returns a valid block of HTML back to the main workflow. I can chain as many of these modules together in whatever way I wish. Some of them don’t use RSS, like the photograph one. That prompts me to look at my photos and pick one, then fills in all the appropriate template text for me to finish off.

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At the end the workflow combines all these blocks of HTML into one fully assembled newsletter and gives me the option to copy it, share it, generate a PDF or anything else I wish. I’m very happy with this. From here I put it in TinyLetter, do a final review and hit send!

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Extensions

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Since this is extensible, I can easily add new modules by creating another workflow that is then stitched into the assembly process. And because I’m using Workflow in iOS, I can access a wide variety of data from different systems. RSS is a basic one that many services support, but Workflow can look at my Calendar, Address Book and many others. I’ve thought about weird things like calendar statistics for example. Or if I really wanted to overshare I could pull in recent data from the Health app.

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I’ve found that it’s easiest to understand Workflow when you see what other people do with it. Perhaps this will turn some lightbulbs on for others on how they could automate use Workflow effectively!

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This post is part of the Shortcuts Collection.

\n", "date_published": "2017-06-23T21:38:14-05:00", "url": "https://www.thingelstad.com/2017/06/23/assembling-the-weekly.html", "tags": ["Weekly Thing","Productivity","Blogging","Shortcuts"] } ] }