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A geeky problem with Mac scripting

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Here’s what turns out to be the most intractable problem I’ve encountered in my move to OSX as my primary work platform:

For years I used a programmers’ text editor tool in Windows called Ultraedit. It worked great and allowed me to record macros. The most indispensible one, which I used constantly, was for automating the creation of HTML links. I would store the link-to URL in a clipboard, select some link text and start the macro. The macro would magically surround the link text with the proper HTML code to link it to the URL in the clipboard.

I achieved this by
(a) copying the link text to a second clipboard;
(b) typing the <a href=”

(c) pasting in the URL from the first clipboard;
(d) closing the tag with “>
(e) pasting the link text from clipboard #2;
(f) ending the link with </a>

It sounds kinda complicated but it worked beautifully, and Ultraedit’s macro recorder simply “got it.” I created the macro years ago, and its keyboard shortcut became hardwired in my memory.

Now I’m using TextWrangler and, alas, AppleScript doesn’t seem to get it at all. The AppleScript recorder seems to grab the actions at too specific a level — i.e., it doesn’t capture “switch to next clipboard” but records the specific clipboard number; it doesn’t capture “current active document” but records the specific document name that I happen to be using while I’m recording the script.

I was gearing myself up to learn enough AppleScript to try to write the script (or edit a recorded script well enough to make it work). Then I discovered that, perhaps thanks to Snow Leopard upgrade, the entire AppleScript recorder in TextWrangler doesn’t seem to work at all. When I record a script and try to save it I get the following error message: (MacOS Error code: -4960). As far as I can tell, I can’t save any scripts at all, making any AppleScript solution to this problem seem hopeless.

I know, I know, if I had learned emacs years ago I wouldn’t have any of these problems. But I didn’t. I welcome any tips/suggestions! Is there a text-editor for Mac that will make my life easier? (I used to use the full version of BBEdit, and, back in those days, it wasn’t any easier to script than Textwrangler.) Is there some obvious solution I’m missing?

Miscellany of the moment

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  • Over at MediaShift’s Idea Lab blog, where as a Knight News Challenge grantee I’m posting occasionally, I’ve published a discussion of an interesting problem we’re grappling with at MediaBugs: How do you organize a set of categories for all the different kinds of mistakes journalists can make? Do weigh in over there and help us sort out this epistemological puzzle!
  • Andrew Leonard had a fine take on the Duran Duran guy’s complaint that easy access to the musical past devalues the present and inhibits innovation:

    But rather than worry about whether the Internet is exerting a baleful influence, I think we just need to make our peace with the fact that every new technology creates a different space for cultural practice. Duran Duran without cable television or a high-end production studio is simply unthinkable. Recording technologies enabled the commodification of musical performance on a mass basis. Networked computers have crippled the profitability of that commodification. The adventure is ongoing.

    Perhaps the digitally-enabled overhang of the cultural production of previous generations is a heavy burden. But I guarantee you that those artists who do break free of its restrictions, and can come up with something interesting to say, will be easier to find and easier to enjoy than any pioneers of any previous era were.

    Nick Carr’s is worth reading too:

    Taylor argues that, when it comes to music or any other form of art, the price of our “endless present” is the loss of a certain “magical power” that the artist was once able to wield over the audience. I suspect he’s right.

    Carr seems a little bummed about that price, but I’m more sanguine: Our culture had swung way too far in the direction of artist worship anyway. Less fetishization of the purchased object and the personality who produced it is fine with me.

  • Megan Garber’s piece in CJR on the Pacific garbage patch story funded by Spot.us and appearing in the NYTimes sparked an extended debate in the small but vocal world of new-media journalism punditry. The framing of Garber’s piece, in particular the headline, positioned it as a critique of Spot.us for failing to “deliver” a New York Times piece of sufficient quality. But the body of the piece made the far more useful argument that the garbage-patch reporter, “Garbage Girl” Lindsey Hoshaw, shone far more brightly in the daily blog she produced than in the relatively conventional Times feature.

    To me, it looks like Hoshaw gave the Times what it doubtless asked for in terms of fairly impersonal feature writing. The Times’s reluctance to capitalize on — or even link to! — the blog indicates the limits of its own willingness to embrace new modes of journalism far more than any problems or failures in the Spot.us model.

    Hoshaw’s postmortem is worth reading in full, but this comment stands out:

    And the most rewarding part of the Spot.us project was getting to meet some of the donors in person before I left, listening to their ideas, writing to them on my blog from the middle of the ocean and emailing them when the story came out to celebrate our success.

    I had images of my readers’ faces in my mind while I was at sea and it kept me accountable. These were real people not some unimaginable group called “the public.” I knew their names and I’d met with some of them in person. They were tangible and I thought, “what would Alex think if he knew I blogged on behalf of the ship or that I wasn’t diligent about taking photos at every opportunity?”

    (Full disclosure: I was one of many people who kicked in a small donation via Spot.us to fund the garbage story.)

The “millions of results are useless” myth

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While we’re on the subject of the value of search…

Ken Auletta is on KQED Forum right now, talking about his new Google book, and I just heard him comment on Google’s vulnerability to new competitors by hauling out the old complaint that Google’s provision of millions of results means it’s doing a poor job of serving it’s users.

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“I searched for ‘the real William Shakespeare,’ ” he said (I’m paraphrasing), “and I got five million results. That’s useless.”

We hear this one all the time — and it gets Google’s value precisely wrong. When Google came along in the late ’90s we already had search engines, like AltaVista, that provided millions of results. Google is the antidote to the millions-of-results problem. All of Google’s value — and the reason that Google originally rose to prominence — was that it solved this problem, and got columnists like me to rave about its value while it was still a tiny startup company.

Let’s do that “real William Shakespeare” search. Right now I actually get 15 million results. Who cares? Nobody ever looks past the first, or at most the second or third, page of results. And Google’s first page of results on this query is not bad at all. Many of the top links are amateur-created content, but most of them provide useful secondary links. As a starting point for Web research it’s a pretty good tool. If you fine-tune your query to “Shakespeare authorship debate” you do even better.

Yes, it’s true that the Google search box is less useful with generalized product and commercial searches (like “London hotels”), where the results are laden with ads and fought over by companies armed with SEO tactics. Google has all sorts of flaws. But it’s time to bury the old “millions” complaints. They’re meaningless. And Auletta’s willingness to trot them out doesn’t give me much hope for the value of his new book.

Why “junk traffic” isn’t so junky

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I’ve been reading Ryan Chittum’s recent posts at Columbia Journalism Review about the whole Murdoch/WSJ “We’re seceding from Google” flap.

Chittum applauds what he sees as a new appreciation in media circles for the “loyal readership” metric as opposed to the “total monthly visitors” tally, and argues, accurately enough, that the core readership — the fraction of your traffic that represents people who read a lot and keep coming back — is more valuable and important than the drop-ins, the folks who arrive via a search query, read a page, and then vanish. He airily dismisses the transient visitors as “junk traffic.”

This relative valuation of these two kinds of traffic is pretty obvious, and widely understood in the Web industry. Chittum concludes that newspapers shouldn’t be afraid to shut out the search traffic in their effort to convert the loyal readers into paying subscribers (though it’s not clear from his argument whether he means subscribers in print or on a pay-walled-off Web site).

There are two big problems with this analysis.

First, many advertisers, sadly, do not share Chittum’s perspective. When they evaluate a buy, they are often obsessed with “reach.” They want to hit lots of eyeballs. They are far less interested in the repeat visitors. Once they’ve shown you their ad once, they know that you’re probably not going to look at it again, even if they were lucky enough to catch your eye on the first exposure. Transient search traffic helps media sites satisfy these advertisers.

Second, and I think more important, Chittum completely ignores the way “junk traffic” visitors provide “qualified leads” to a Web site: they expose your site to new eyes and give you a shot, admittedly fleeting, and turning some fraction of them into loyal readers. This is the way sites have always built traffic “organically.” In the era of Facebook and Twitter that may be changing, but I’d argue that the principle still holds whether folks are landing on your article page via Google or a retweet. This is a far better way to expand your traffic base than expensive offline advertising.

Chittum’s analysis looks to me like a recipe for stagnation, a method media companies might adopt if they want to harvest cash from their websites to keep their offline products on life support. It’s this sort of thinking — “cash out the potential of the future to prolong the agony of the present” — that has dug so much of the media business such a deep hole already.

Mac life after Ecco

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For years I organized my life with the wonderful, now-orphaned and somewhat antiquated Windows outliner Ecco Pro. For me Ecco was versatile enough to function effectively as both a todo-list manager and a repository for random information, scattered ideas and research. It really could do it all.

I’ve always used both Macs and PCs but this year I’ve migrated my main workspace over to OS X. There were many compelling reasons to do this, but I’ve had to struggle with finding an Ecco replacement. (Yes, I could run it on my Mac in a Windows virtual machine, but it’s a bit kludgy, and it’s time for me to move away from this program that, despite the efforts of many devotees, doesn’t look like it will ever be fully modernized.)

So far, it’s looking to me like there is no one Mac application that can serve in both roles (todo list and information organizer). OmniOutliner is a pretty good all purpose outliner, and it has a companion, “Getting Things Done”-based todo list program called OmniFocus. Though I’ve made my peace with OmniOutliner, I have not fallen in love with OmniFocus. It follows the David Allen GTD approach a little too rigidly for me, it has various features I don’t need and it’s missing some that I do want (as far as I’ve been able to tell, for instance, it lacks the ability to make some item vanish until a certain date when it reappears–what I call the “out of my face” tool).

So I’ve begun exploring various combinations of other tools. Right now, it’s Evernote for research/information and Things for todo management. I’m also going to look into Tinderbox, Yojimbo and some other applications that look promising. I know the Mac ecosystem is full of great products that sometimes have only small followings, so if there’s one you’re especially enamored of, do let me know.

I’ve also been playing around with Thinklinkr, a new Web-based outliner. It has one huge plus: It’s got an absolutely top-notch browser interface (it’s the only browser-based outlining tool I’ve found that is as responsive and fast as Ecco on the desktop — bravo for that!). At the moment, though, it’s a somewhat rudimentary tool; it lacks various features one might want, and it looks like it’s being aimed at the (important but different) market for collaborative outlining rather than personal information management. But it’s definitely worth a look if you’re into outlining.

My UC Berkeley Journalism School talk: This Wednesday

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Just a note for those of you in the area: Come on down to the UC Berkeley School of Journalism this Wednesday, Nov. 4, at 6 p.m. if you’d like to hear me give a talk about blogging, journalism, and MediaBugs.

There will be only a little overlap with the talks I’ve been giving about Say Everything and the history of blogging (like my Hillside Club presentation over the summer).

This time, as befits the forum, I’ll be looking at the roots and nature of the long history of confrontation between professional journalists and bloggers, pointing out some positive directions that may lead us beyond the now well-worn grooves of that conflict, and offering some introductory perspectives about MediaBugs and how it fits in to that larger narrative.

I hope to see lots of you there! Details here.

How the bridge news flowed

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Bay Bridge cable down (via Twitpic)
[photo from twitpic via Larfo]

 

I have a very personal relationship with the ups and downs of the Bay Bridge replacement project. This is not only because I’m a Berkeley resident who often depends on the structure. And it’s not only because I’m lucky enough to have a view of the bridge (distant but majestic) from my back window.

I used the project as a framing device in Dreaming in Code. You see, there are always people pounding the table complaining, “Why can’t we build software the way we build bridges?” It’s a fair question, but it forgets a couple of things. There’s the obvious: software is abstract, bridges are physical, and therefore they are constructed differently and behave differently. But the table-pounders are also forgetting about the long history of bridge failures. As I watched the Bay Bridge project unfold during the time I worked on Dreaming, I began by wondering what made bridge-building and software construction so different. Three years later, as the bridge project had quadrupled in cost, been redesigned several times and been put on hold for many months by a political dispute, I ended up asking whether the two undertakings were really so different after all.

Now the bridge even has its very own bug, and some down time. They could hang a big Fail Whale from its girders!

As it happened, I spent this evening playing a new game with one of my sons, so I was relatively off the grid, and found out about the bridge’s sudden closure only when I scanned Twitter a little while ago.

I first turned to the SF Gate home page, where I found a solid and informative lead story that must have been assembled and posted by the Chronicle’s reporters and editors very quickly indeed. The Chron story also leads the Google News block on the event.

The Oakland Tribune also had a reasonably thorough piece, with a focus on commute details, that the San Jose Mercury News — now part of the same chain — reprinted, along with another Trib feature that basically compiled people’s Twitter messages about the event. The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat has a solid take posted, too.

KRON had a fairly full report of its own and easily accessible video from its newscast. CBS5 had an AP story and some raw video. KGO/ABC had a brief story. Yahoo had a fuller version of the AP’s story. KTVU had a story credited to itself and Bay City News.

Over at SFist I found a bloggy take on the event, with more links but less hard info than the Chron story (which SFist linked to). Other local blogs, like Berkeleyside and Oakland Local, also did some linking and summarizing.

CNN had a brief story. As I write this, the New York Times’ new Bay Area blog doesn’t have anything up. Wikipedia’s Bay Bridge page already has a sentence about the news. And over at Spot.us you can find a pitch — out for a while now but likely to see fresh wind in its sails — for an investigative project by some veteran journalists, backed by the Public Press and McSweeney’s (whose founder, Dave Eggers, seems to have kicked in a generous grant), looking into why the bridge project has had such problems.

So there you have it. The longterm investigative pieces that might once have come from the big-paper newsroom must now be funded by other means (I kicked in my $20!). But the papers are still doing some valuable spot-news work. With a story like this, at least, the best combination of speed and depth in an early report still comes from the leading local daily newspapers.

We knew that, of course. But we also know that we simply aren’t going to be able to count on having those sources that much longer. This week brought news of a precipitous decline in the Chronicle’s circulation. We should be planning (as Dave Winer has been urging for a long time) for life without it.

And that means figuring out how to make sure that our community has a way to find out what happened, and what’s going on, the next time a cable breaks on the bridge.

Some catchup links

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Here are some highlights from the Say Everything front over the last couple of months:

  • Jeremy Hatch at the Rumpus put together an in-depth interview that covered a lot of interesting ground:

    There is this constant refrain in the journalism-blogging dialogue, about how we need to support the institutions of journalism because bloggers don’t have the resources that a real newsroom has. The classic example is the Baghdad Bureau of the New York Times, which costs millions of dollars a year, and reporters are putting their lives on the line to go there, and bloggers are less likely to do that.

    That’s all true, but you can also say that actually, newsrooms have very limited resources. I know this as a managing editor: you have X number of people, and X cubed number of stories: you’re constantly making difficult choices about what to cover and what not to cover; you’re constantly thinking about how you’re deploying your troops; you’re always thinking about how you’re spending your limited newshole.

    The news world is a world of constrained resources. That’s more so today, but it has always been like that. And the blogger who cares about some particular subject really doesn’t have the same constraints.

  • On the newspaper-review front, I’m proudest of this Boston Globe piece. Thanks, Carol Iaciofano! I also got an “Editors Choice” pick from the Chicago Tribune, and Berkeley’s Tom Goldstein covered the book for the San Francisco Chronicle.
  • BookTV came and taped my very first bookstore event back in July at Books Inc. in San Francisco. The whole thing is available here on their site, or you can see the first 10 minutes on YouTube.

Normal programming will resume

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Where was I?

It turns out that starting a small company, getting a project in gear, and hiring people is time-consuming.

I knew that. But I didn’t fully calculate how fully all of it would distract me from the routine of blogging. Then there was some travel and some family commitments, and — my god, it’s a month later.

I should probably have been posting about it all as I went along, but once I stopped posting, it became easy just to…continue not posting.

That will end. Now!

Drupal designer needed

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For a project I’m working on (not MediaBugs but another effort in the media realm that’s a collaboration with Dan Gillmor and Bill Gannon):

We have some work for a designer who’s got lots of experience with Drupal to help us finish up a partially implemented design. This is a short-term gig that, we think, should be straightforward for someone who already knows Drupal well.

If you or someone you know might fit that bill, do be in touch with me at scottr /at/ this domain (wordyard.com). Thanks!