Our cottage on the shore of Lake Michigan for the week. Very pleasant here.
Cairns on the Lake Michigan shoreline near where we are staying this week.
Our view for the week. Lake Michigan looks great. Just after sunset.
Tammy and I starting our family vacation to Saugatuck by checking out the lakeshore.
Assembling the Weekly Thing
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.
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?
Workflow to the Rescue
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.
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! 👏
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.
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.
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!
Extensions
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.
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!
This post is part of the Shortcuts Collection.
Updating my Bose QuietComfort 35’s firmware from 1.0.6 to 1.3.2.
I ❤️ updating firmware. 😁
Great night with Peter Zaballos taking in a MN United win! ⚽️🎉👏🏻
Yeah, #TeamSPS Ice Cream social today! 🍦👏🏻
Genius design for Pokémon themed bags boards.
Giant lawn dominoes? Haven’t seen this before. 🤔
Cool ice cream social 🍦 at Fuller Park!
Time for some Kubb!
Cheese, popcorn, strawberries and chocolate. 🍴
Enjoying summers bounty! Fresh strawberries!
Happy Fathers Day to all the Dads out there! Be “Rad Like Dad”! 👏🏻
Fun stop at Whitetail Woods Regional Park.
Midsommer Festival at American Swedish Institute.
Family selfie! @ Mill City Museum
Dan Wilson hinting at new Semisonic album? New song “Basement Tapes” sounds great!
Introducing the Weekly Thing
A while back I tried a way of sharing links to things that I found interesting every week. I did it by making a link blog post and then sharing links to that blog post. I got more positive feedback on those posts than I expected. People really liked them and found value in what I was highlighting.
But I didn’t like the link posts cluttering up my blog. They felt different and I eventually decided to stop doing the posts mostly because I was frustrated with how my website was coming along.
Email Newsletters
I enjoy a number of weekly newsletters. I subscribe to MacStories for the members only Club MacStories newsletter. Patrick Rhone’s One More Thing is a very well written personal newsletter and a treat whenever it comes. Sitting down with an espresso and my iPad to casually read through weekly newsletters is a treat on the weekend.
Email newsletters are ‘old school’. There is something about the medium that feels more personal and more conversational than others. I wanted to try this out, and realized that those old link posts were the right foundation to build upon.
Next I wanted to see how hard this would be. I quickly looked into TinyLetter and realized it would be pretty easy. I like that TinyLetter exists as a way for personal email newsletters. It’s very easy to use.
Weekly Thing
With the basis of my links I decided to put together a newsletter. I
went with the somewhat goofy name of the Weekly Thing playing off my
last name. Total aside, but I used to own the domain
thing.org in the mid 90’s. I was at the U of MN at
the time and I got an email from The Thing, a museum
in Germany, asking if they could have the domain. I transferred it to
them, seemed the right thing to do. My future as a domain squatter was
determined at that time.
I’ve been quietly publishing the Weekly Thing for a few weeks now to an invited group of friends. I’ve been testing out my automation and the structure. I’m very pleased with how it’s working and this week put the subscribe page live and started sharing it. My first goal is to get to 100 subscribers and continue to flesh out the content. I hope you all enjoy it!
Go to the Weekly Thing to subscribe!
Excited to see Semisonic playing Great Divide tonight!
Cool to have Jeremy Messersmith open for Semisonic. His voice reminds me of Dan Wilson.
It’s amazing how many bands are still playing from the 90’s. Pixies. Dinosaur Jr. many others.
Semisonic - FNT!
Minnehaha creek tonight.
Last day of school for both kids, last day of T-Ball and Daughters birthday to boot. 🤩