Public Logging with Alfred and Littlelogs
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I am a big fan of Belle Beth Cooper. She's a pretty rad person who writes a lot of great stuff. I've been reading much of her work since her days with Buffer, but these days she's writing for Ghost and working on her own company Hello Code along with Josh Sharp. My following of Belle led me to discover her little company and start using Exist (a product that I will write about at some point). I've just recently turned to the other product made by Hello Code, Littlelogs, and wanted to share something small I made.
The idea behind Littlelogs is to publicly (or privately, if you'd rather), share your progress on what you're working on. The description it offers can't be stated more plainly:
It's like keeping a journal of your work progress, but in public.
It's somewhere to talk shop and be part of a community of people making and learning cool things.
But in the very short time I've been using it (just a couple days), I found that when I really got work done, I didn't think to go to the site and actually log something. So I decided to make the logging process a little easier utilizing one of the site's features: logging by email.
I'm a huge fan of Alfred, now finding it difficult to work without it. I decided to make a simple workflow that would allow me to log things to Littlelogs using Alfred. To do this, the workflow just runs an AppleScript to send what ever you type into Alfred as an email. It comes with a few pre-requisites:
- A Littlelogs account (duh)
- Your Littlelogs secret email
- An email account setup in Apple Mail
The first thing you'll need is to find your Littlelogs secret email address. You can find it by signing in to your Littlelogs account and looking under settings. Either copy that address somewhere convenient, or keep it available for the next step.
Next, download the Alfred workflow from my website. Add it to Alfred by double-clicking the file. It will open in Alfred's preferences, and once imported you'll need to make one small edit to the script. Double click the AppleScript action in the workflow to open the script. You need to copy/paste your secret email address into the script as shown below (note that the quotation marks are required).
Save the edit and you're ready to use it! Using the workflow is easy. Simply type 'log' into Alfred, followed by what you want to log and it'll ship it off to Littlelogs.
There is one small caveat to the script, though. Since it's sending the message using Apple Mail, it does require that you have an email account setup in Mail. It also will open Mail to send the message if Mail isn't already open. I've tried finding ways around that requirement, but I'm not sure it's possible using AppleScript. If you know otherwise, please let me know! (Big thanks to Graham Miln for sharing this mail script publicly.)
This simple workflow has definitely led me to actually log things to Littlelogs and I find it really convenient. Here's to hoping that by logging what I'm working on I'll crush it every day.
