Automating AutoBlogger

I started out trying to write a post. Failed.

So I worked on writing a post analyzing my failure.

Failed

Actually, not exactly.

Writing is thinking. I thought a lot about why I had failed. And at last understood why I hadn’t finished the first post, or the second, and many others.

So that was a win.

Why I failed

I had an idea but didn’t have a clear picture of what I wanted to write. So I kept on writing thing after thing, exploring the space, hoping I would find the answer.

I didn’t check to see if I was on track—which would have been hard since I had no track: only a destination, and no road to get there.

I thought some more and looked for other things that often went wrong. Like starting to write something, but not having enough intention to persevere.

I decided that a checklist would help me. So I designed one.

Then I realized that this was not the first time I’d written a blog post complaining about not writing and analyzing my failure to write.

So I went an found the earlier ones I’d written.

Holy crap!

Failure -> learning; learning -> forgetting

I looked back over the many posts I’ve written about my blogging failures. Each one captured a bit of wisdom.

I’d learned from my mistakes. Yay!

Each post had a bit of wisdom, hard-won. And then forgotten.

Or forgotten by my meat brain. But I’m a cyborg. I’d retained the memory in my cyber brain.

Limitations of meat

My meat brain is limited. And aging is making it worse.

But my cyber-brain is—for all practical purposes—unlimited. And technology is making it better.

I’d improved my writing process by picking suitable new technologies and putting them together into a workflow. So why not make that better?

Why not automate more of my writing process.?

And then, I thought: why just writing? I’ve got lots of things that I’ve learned, practiced, and then forgotten. The tools for automating them are at hand. I can learn them.

And then I thought: why not even further automate waking up?

So I started coding something.

And that put me in discovery mode. I discovered a whole new generation of coding tools and techniques that have emerged since the last time I played programmer—just a few years ago.

Down the technology rabbit hole I went. I disappeared for more than a week.

Now I’m back, with a lot of problems solved, a backlog of posts to write, and burning desire to increase my productivity and to use the available technology to overcome some of my biological deficiencies.

AutoBlogger improved

The last time I dove into my blogging workflow, I wrote Authoring, improved, which was an improvement over High productivity blogging workflow. Right? Sure.

Some things stuck. And some things deteriorated. In particular, I lost my ability to use Google voice typing to write drafts.

So here’s Rev 1 of the better process:

I click a button that will:

• Open a tab with a new document—a copy of my blogging template document—and put it into my Google Docs BlogDraft folder
• Open a tab with StackEdit
• Open a tab with Grammarly
• Open a tab with a new post page in Blogger

That would be a great start.

So I built it.

And here’s a video of how it works.

Transcription workflow

Next: When I’m writing a post, I sometimes want to pull quotes from a YouTube video and put them in the post.

Here is the workflow that I have used and that I’m going to automate next.

I made a video of the procedure.

I start with three tabs open: the YouTube video, one for the conversion program (I’m using one called Online Video Converter and one for the transcription program (I’m using otter.ai).

I start in the YouTube tab and select the URL.

I go to the conversion tab and paste it in the conversion program. Then choose format. I’m using mp3. I click and wait. Then click download and it.

Now I go to the Otter tab and import it. And after a while, I have my transcript.

So I used the same programming technique to open the video converter and the transcription program tabs and carry out the rest of the procedure manually. For now, at least.

I’ll post a video of the improved tool, later.

Programming workflow

That’s going to be my next deep dive.

The plan is:

1. Describe each technology that I am using with plusses and minuses
2. Put together a workflow description
3. Solve each problem that I find

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