Moroccan Coriander and Carrot Soup | Cakecrumbs – Bookmarking. This looks good.

This column will change your life: precrastination | Life and style | The Guardian – I definitely recognise some of myself in that description. I’ve actually talked about it with my manager at work. A few years ago I picked up on the idea that if a task only takes 2 minutes, you should just do it rather than put it off. But sometimes that leads to you answering meaningless emails when, really, you have more important things you should be doing. Something to ponder.

(Link courtesy of Stefanie on Facebook.)

Mi9 Anniversary
A big milestone came and went last week: my one-year Mi9 anniversary! It went so fast, and so much has changed in that time. My team launched the 9jumpin website and started migrating all the Channel 9 shows over to it, starting with The Block. A few friends left the company, and some old friends have joined. My role changed massively five months ago and I’m still figuring it out. I’ve had to hire people, help with the FY15 budget, negotiate contracts, and manage a dozen direct reports. I’ve spent way too many hours at work, and way too few exercising/sleeping/knitting/socialising. (But it’s getting better!) Honestly, I wouldn’t change a thing. Thank you so much (again) to Jody for encouraging me to apply and getting me out of the dreaded bank a year ago. I’m a lot happier now, and my career’s taken a direction I never would have anticipated. 🙂

While I’m on the topic of automated posting, I should also note for posterity that I changed the way I was pulling in Instagram photos. Previously I was using Webstagram to generate an RSS feed that was ingested by a cron job. Now that Instagram has an API, I decided to switch over to the officially supported method. I found this page very helpful, especially the comments where the author directed me to How to generate an Instagram access token and Lookup your Instagram user ID. I also toyed around with displaying my photos in Instagram Web Embeds, but I didn’t like how little control you have over the appearance. (Not to mention the fact that the caption isn’t shown, so I couldn’t search for my own images on my site.)

Now if only Facebook’s API weren’t a giant nightmare of a mess. AGGREGATE ALL THE THINGS!

I was reading Flipboard the other day on the iPad, and I got annoyed for the hundredth time that there’s no easy way to get content OUT of Flipboard. I mean, if I see an article that I want to blog, it’s at least six clicks for me to post it here:

1. Click on the article.
2. Click the share button.
3. Click “Open in Safari”.
4. Click the bookmarks button.
5. Click my custom bookmarklet to “add to w-g”.
6. Click “submit” on the form.

(And since iOS doesn’t seem to save my security credentials, I usually have to type in a username and password too.)

It’s really annoying. What I want is to just click a “Share” button the way I can do in The Old Reader (which itself is based on how it used to work in Google Reader, back before Google gutted it and left it to die) and have it show up on my blog*. So I started thinking and tinkering.

Flipboard doesn’t have any RSS feeds or APIs publicly available. However, if you create a “Magazine” in the app, it gets published to the web on your public profile page. That made me think I could “flip” (ugh) articles to a magazine and then somehow pull the data in from the web URL. Eventually I realised that would involve scraping though, so I gave up on that angle.

The method I eventually settled on involved using Pocket as an intermediary. Pocket is a “read later” service that Flipboard supports, and conveniently Pocket offers an RSS feed of all your saved items. So I set up an account and then configured a cron job on my site to periodically hit the RSS feed and pull in any new items from the last day. That gets me down to a mere 3 clicks:

1. Click on the article.
2. Click the share button.
3. Click “Save to Pocket.”

Easy peasy!

* Granted, that also involves a cron job pulling in data, but at least The Old Reader makes it easy by providing an RSS feed of your shared items.