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Sharing content between blogs in ecto

As most of you might guess, I've more than one blog in this world, and often, like to post the same things to multiple places. Unfortunately, most of the MovableType-to-other plugins I've seen and tried kind of suck. So I just hacked together a way to do it in ecto with AppleScript (Duh!):

tell application "ecto" set theDocument to document 1 set theTitle to entry title of theDocument set theBody to entry body of theDocument set theCrossPost to make new document at beginning of documents with properties {current personality:"ecto account name", current blog:"blog title", entry title:theTitle, entry body:theBody, publish status:true, categories:{}} set current blog of theCrossPost to "blog title" end tell

This is pretty easy to read code, so I left off the comments. The only odd part is this line:

set current blog of theCrossPost to "blog title"

Which is necessitated by ecto's suboptimal blog listing facility. (It lists "personalities" and blogs as colon delimited text in one big string, with one line per entry. So no matter what initial blog you set it to, it's always going to pick the first one by default. So you have to re-set the actual blog. Annoying.) However, this is still better than manual copy and paste. I did post some of the issues with ecto's dictionary in the ecto forums, so we'll see what happens.

Technorati Tags: AppleScript, ecto

Categories: Applescript, Mac OS X Scripts

Posted by John C. Welch at 23:26 | Permalink

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar charachters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.

tell application "ecto"
	set theDocument to document 1
	set theTitle to entry title of theDocument
	set theBody to entry body of theDocument
	
	set theCrossPost to make new document at beginning of documents with properties {current personality:"ecto account name", current blog:"blog title", entry title:theTitle, entry body:theBody, publish status:true, categories:{}}
	set current blog of theCrossPost to "blog title"
end tell

This is pretty easy to read code, so I left off the comments. The only odd part is this line: set current blog of theCrossPost to "blog title" Which is necessitated by ecto's suboptimal blog listing facility. (It lists "personalities" and blogs as colon delimited text in one big string, with one line per entry. So no matter what initial blog you set it to, it's always going to pick the first one by default. So you have to re-set the actual blog. Annoying.) However, this is still better than manual copy and paste. I did post some of the issues with ecto's dictionary in the ecto forums, so we'll see what happens.

Technorati Tags: AppleScript, ecto