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Thursday, December 7

Grabbing a domain name out of a URL using Shortcuts

Recently I needed the ability to grab a domain name (specifically the hostname) out of a URL using Shortcuts.  

I wanted to integrate this functionality into a much larger shortcut, but this blog post will highlight just the domain parsing bit.


This will get you the whole domain name from any given URL from the share sheet.  That being said, I wanted to take it a step further and get just the hostname out of the domain name:


Assuming that there is more than two parts to the domain name, this works.  But if you have and "A" type of url "blah.com" instead of a "CNAME" type like: "www.blah.com", you're going to get "com" as a result.  So your milage may vary.

I couldn't find a good way to do this on the Internet, despite several attempts for people to try and figure it out using regex.  You can then go on to store the result as a variable and then use the variable anywhere else in the rest of the Shortcut.  

Anyway, here's a way to do it.  Hopefully this blog post helps someone trying to figure out the same issue.  It's a little hacky, but knock yourself out.


Please leave comments below.

Sort emails by year, using AppleScript

So, way back when I was using Thunderbird, I had this awesome plugin that organized my archived emails by year. It was super handy for finding stuff or just taking a trip down memory lane.

But when I switched to Mail.app, I couldn't find a similar plugin that I liked. Plus, even if one existed, I'd have to install it on every new Mac I got. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and whip up some AppleScript magic.

In the code, you can pick a folder (sourceFolder) - in my case, it's "Recovered". You also need to specify your account name, like "iCloud" in my code. If your account goes by a different name, like "Exchange" or "Gmail", just tweak that part.

Then there's this variable called "yearsMailbox" at the top of the code, (in my case "Years") which is basically the folder where the emails will end up based on their years. You can rename it if you're feeling fancy.

You can probably make this more efficient by having it map the year folders one time instead of checking every time it wants to move a message, but I feel you're just playing "AppleScript golf" at that point.  This works.  It works great.  Moving on.

tell application "Mail"

-- Specify the parent mailbox where the year folders are located

set yearsMailbox to mailbox "Years" of account "iCloud" -- Adjust if the path is different

-- List of sub-mailboxes under 'Years', each named with a four-digit year

set yearFolders to every mailbox of yearsMailbox

-- Specify the source folder where emails are currently located

set sourceFolder to mailbox "Recovered" -- Replace "SourceFolder" with the name of your folder

repeat with eachMessage in (get messages of sourceFolder)

set messageDate to date received of eachMessage

set messageYear to year of messageDate as string

-- Check if a folder for the year exists and move the message

repeat with eachYearFolder in yearFolders

if name of eachYearFolder is messageYear then

move eachMessage to eachYearFolder

exit repeat

end if

end repeat

end repeat

end tell





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Monday, November 13

Moving from Omnifocus to Reminders

Let's say you're like me, an avid Omnifocus user, but you've been hearing great things about Reminders on MacOS/iOS/iPadOS, and you want to give it a shot.  Well, here's an AppleScript that will move everything over for you. It won't delete anything out of Omnifocus, so nothing will get messed up, but, it will take your existing projects and move them over as separate lists, then move the tasks over, preserving flagged, priorities, and the notes in each task (to Reminders.app's limitations).

TWO CAVEATS THOUGH

1. It can't move nested (subtasks) tasks from Omnifocus over, this is a very tricky problem to solve, and it's beyond my AppleScripting skills to access the subtasks and move them over properly.  
2. I wanted to implement "tags" from Omnifocus over to the "tags" feature in Reminders, however Apple doesn't have "tags" as a Reminders dictionary item in AppleScript.

Other than that, this works fine:

property defaultList : "Inbox"


tell application "OmniFocus"

activate

tell front document of application "OmniFocus"

set theProjects to flattened projects -- Gets all projects, ignoring folders

repeat with aProject in theProjects

set projectName to name of aProject

set projectStatus to completed of aProject

-- Process only if the project is not completed

if not projectStatus then

set theTasks to tasks of aProject

-- Create a list in Reminders for each non-completed project

my createListInReminders(projectName)

repeat with aTask in theTasks

set taskStatus to completed of aTask

-- Process only if the task is not completed

if not taskStatus then

set theTaskName to name of aTask

set theNote to note of aTask

set theDueDate to due date of aTask

set isFlagged to flagged of aTask -- Check if the task is flagged

-- Determine priority based on flagged status

set thePriority to 0 -- default no priority

if isFlagged then

set thePriority to 1 -- high priority for flagged tasks

end if

-- Add tasks to the corresponding list in Reminders

my createReminder(projectName, theTaskName, theDueDate, theNote, thePriority)

end if

end repeat

end if

end repeat

end tell

end tell


on createListInReminders(listName)

tell application "Reminders"

if not (exists (list listName)) then

make new list with properties {name:listName}

end if

end tell

end createListInReminders


on createReminder(thelist, theTask, theDate, theNote, thePriority)

try

set theBody to theNote

tell application "Reminders"

if not (exists (list thelist)) then

my createListInReminders(thelist)

end if

tell list thelist of default account

if theDate is not missing value then

make new reminder with properties {name:theTask, remind me date:theDate, body:theBody, priority:thePriority}

else

make new reminder with properties {name:theTask, body:theBody, priority:thePriority}

end if

end tell

end tell

on error

-- Error handling can be implemented here if needed

end try

end createReminder





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Wednesday, January 4

A shortcut to make a PDF out of a webpage and save it to Notes.app

While on MacOS (and iOS) you can use the Share Sheet from Safari to share a webpage to Notes, it only shares the title, URL, and the favicon to save to a new Note.

I wanted a PDF of the entire page, so I wrote a shortcut to do it.


Here's a link to it, but also, here's a screenshot, since I know the shortcut links can be somewhat unreliable.




It grabs the input from the share sheet, gets the content of the page, and it saves the contents of the page as a variable called "Title".  Then it creates a PDF from the shortcut input.  It also grabs the URL from the shortcut input

Then I use the output of the variable "Title" in the Text block to grab the Name of the page:


Then it creates a Note with the title of the Note as the "Name" from the Title variable in a folder in my notes called "Scans", appends the URL from the "Get URLs" block and saves that in the Note, then appends the PDF to it.



Please leave comments below.