A new small Mac app has been getting a bit of attention lately called TinyGrab. Its function is really straight-forward; it intercepts screen grabs you make and uploads them to its webserver for public sharing. Very nice little idea actually, and whenever I’ve needed to solve this task I’ve just used DropBox, which I am absolutely in love with (my DropBox referral link if you don’t have a free account yet).

So I got thinking, how can I automate this for my needs? First of all, I don’t want all my screenshots going up to DropBox, but I do want the ability to easily add them. A right-click option to “Send to DropBox” would be perfect. 10 seconds of Googling reveals Post to Dropbox Service by Oliver Stengele. It does exactly what I wanted… and why I hadn’t thought of looking for it before today is beyond me.

I made some quick adjustments; since I always wanted these sent to a subfolder called “Screenshots” I simply created it inside my Public DropBox folder.

Addendum: I had a note here about changing your dropbox id to include “/screenshots” after it, but that isn’t needed with the new workflow files.

After the files are downloaded (there are 2 *.workflow files included, just move them into ~/Library/Services/) you’ll need to edit them to include your user id. This is where the path for DropBox comes from, so instead of making mine:

Make it:

Addendum: I also changed the “Copy Finder Items” folder to “screenshots” in Automator. If you want to save yourself the trouble, here are my revised scripts (DropBox_tools.zip).  Please note that you must change the “dropbox_id” line above in each to get it working. Do do that, just double-click on the workflow and it’ll open in automator. Then edit away!

And now anytime I’m ready to share a screenshot, I right click it and it is automatically moved into DropBox for me, and the URL is automagically copied to my clipboard.

Handy!

Last week my good friends over at EE_Insider focused on the imminent release of EE 2.0. If you haven’t read it yet, go read it now. They feature articles, interviews, and news, and always with a bit of humour (yes Kenny…. there’s a “u” in that word). They asked me for an interview, but after EECI2009 my wife and I took a few more days to tour around Holland… and l long story short… the interview only got finished right now :)

Go read EE 2 Week Straggler: The Return of Derek Allard! (Interview) for my thoughts on the future of CodeIgniter, the development of EE 2.0, and what it means to unite CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine.

We had sent out a set of interview questions that we weren’t sure we would receive for ExpressionEngine 2 Week. Derek Allard, one of EllisLab’s developers, was on vacation. Since he’d been slaving away for years on EE 2, we gave him a free pass. But Derek is what the kids call a “trooper” and he came back to us this week with the answers! It turned out to be a really great interview, timely due to the discussion and popularity of CodeIgniter and EE, and we got permission from the ‘Lab to post it. So, EE denizens, it’s my pleasure to give you our interview with the great Derek Allard

Back when I first setup this blog, one of the first things I did was setup akismet to catch spam (Sidebar:huge props to Lodewijk “Low” Schutte for his article on setting up Akismet for ExpressionEngine). I just checked today for false positives, which I do every few days. Generally the spam is very easy to spot and I delete it sight unseen, but today I took the time to read the few spam comments that were caught. 8 of them were banal, but the 9th was hilarious.

Now I know that that they often try to decieve filters with Madlib style randomly made up sentences, but this one couldn’t have turned out any better.

Your blog was of armpit awesome again even though it was petrifying for me to flagulate what happened.You turned what could have been a very folderol thing into something side-splitting and positive. Do pick with care! Also you dwell portable radio news programme show.I betrothed you xoxox

And doubly funny is that “folderol” is actually a word.

fol⋅de⋅ral [fol-duh-ral]
–noun
1. mere nonsense; foolish talk or ideas.
2. a trifle; gimcrack; gew-gaw.

Its a sad day when I learn that spammers have a better vocabulary than you do. The good news is that “flagulate” is not a word, and I get to keep holding my head high!