Two techie things I’d like to do but can’t - can you?
1) Get NetNewsWire to output the stories from a Smart List as an HTML page of links, rather than an ordered list of links within the program. This is rather like the Preaggregator concept, but applied to a Smart List, not a normal feed. (You can’t do it with Preaggregator, because a Smart List doesn’t have a feed URL.) Then I could terrify y’all with the latest bird flu stories, for example. But I suspect this is impossible without Brent Simmons’s intervention.
2) Get Spotlight to index .php files so I can find weird functions referenced from one Wordpress page in another. (OK, usually they’re in the file called “functions.php”. but even so, the lack of .php indexing ain’t good. They’re only text files, but it won’t touch them.) This failure bugs me.
Update: Brent Simmons (see comments) is right: you definitely can do No.1 using Applescript. Kudos to him for making NetNewsWire so scriptable, something that few organisations, Apple included, do. The benefit though is that users can build in their own bizarre features. Which I shall do once I’ve completed this presentation on the future of journalism…
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Channel 4's Factcheck: nice idea, except.. where's the RSS feed? (3 April 2005; score: 35.92%)
- Those video iPod announcements analysed (15 October 2005; score: 18.16%)
- Why can't things all just work together? Well, why not? (9 December 2004; score: 11.67%)
![[Valid RSS]](wp-includes/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed"){kind=small}
June 27th, 2005 at 1:46 am
It should be possible to write an AppleScript script that generates an HTML page of links from a smart list in NetNewsWire. I haven’t tried it myself, but I believe all the scripting hooks you might need are there. (If you find that’s not true, then let me know where the problems are.)
June 27th, 2005 at 8:39 am
As for the — it would be easy enough in Windows, I think, with some kind of programmers’ editor like Ultraedit to group all the wordpress PHP files into a project, which then has all its functions indexed. Surely there’s something on the Mac which will do the trick if you look in that direction, outside the spotlight.
June 27th, 2005 at 4:39 pm
To index .php files, just follow these instructions from MacOSXHints.com
[ http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050514182520714 ]
works as advertised for me :)