This is focused pretty heavily toward a particular type of user, the guy who works from a lot of different devices, has his own specific ways of doing things, and likes to customize his workflow really heavily with tools and tricks to smooth out rough edges. When you set this up, you’ve got a huge variety of bookmarklet tools that are just how you like them, they’re available everywhere you browse (including your mobile devices), and you can edit your bookmarklets everywhere all at once.
Ingredients:
- Quix
- Custom Quix command file
- Dropbox
- Simplenote
- Notational Velocity
- iPhone (optional)
- iPad (optional)
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Install Quix in your browser.
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Go through your bookmarks and move all your old bookmarklets into a Quix custom command file. You won’t be able to use it yet because it’s not publicly available on the internet yet. Patience.
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Put that custom command file in your Notational Velocity textfile folder. Now you can edit it easily from NV.
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Set up Simplenote syncing for Notational Velocity and install Simplenote on your phone and your iPad. Now you can edit your command file from anywhere you have Simplenote or NV.
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Open up a terminal, cd into your Dropbox Public directory, and do
ln /path/to/your/quix-command-file.txt
Now you have a symbolic link to your command file. It’s the same file, it just appears in two places. You can edit it anywhere you have access to your Dropbox, plus it’s available through the Dropbox public files interface and therefore available to Quix.
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Copy the Dropbox public url to the command file.
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Go back to the Extend Quix page and paste the link to the command file’s public url into the box there. Ditch your old Quix bookmarklet and replace it with the new one that’s generated on this page.
While you’re at it, put it on all your browsers. Put it on your phone, on your iPad, at home, at work, on your laptop, on the portable browser on your thumbdrive, anyplace where you might be browsing. Your custom commands file is accessible via your Dropbox and via Simplenote, so you can always tweak it. Dropbox backs up multiple versions so you can always revert it.
You could replace Notational Velocity and Dropbox with Simpletext but I don’t really like running Simpletext in addition to Dropbox if I can help it.
If you have more suggestions for additional improvements, or you make tweaks to add support for non-Apple devices, I’d love to hear them.
Update: I originally recommended a symbolic link in step 5, but that doesn’t work reliably. I now use a hard link instead.
