Using a Mac and want to get a bunch of your NetNewsWire feed items into Evernote?

Description

NetNewsWire is the heart of my browsing experience these days. I’m spending as much time reading feeds as I do browsing the web and it’s important for me to be able to keep track of the things I am reading and want to reference later.

Once Evernote enabled Applescript support, I realized that I could file away the feed items that were useful to me. Evernote is a real life-saver: It’s accessible from practically every type of computing platform short of an abacus. If you have a Mac, your notes become part of your Spotlight index. Fewer ideas and articles get lost. For someone like me who is working on a dozen different projects simultaneously this is a real “quality of life” improvement, reclaiming precious brainspace that I can devote towards writing coherent blog posts.

To that end, I cobbled together a script that would let me tag and file my news feed items quickly. That script works like a charm for me to quickly tag-and-file as I read my feed items, but I felt that it wasn’t quite up to snuff when it was time for some heavier lifting….

Luckily, I remembered that Dan Byler had written a superb script to archive a bunch of feed items into DEVONThink (another key piece of my workflow). Could I adapt it to work with Evernote?

Yup!

Features

Like Dan’s original script, you can do a batch archive of the:

• All Items in a Folder;
• Unread Items in a Folder;
• The contents of the Flagged Items Folder

I have added tag support, which lets you tag items on the way into Evernote. The script will also retrieve an alphabetized list of your current Evernote Notebooks and allow you to select which notebook to archive the feed items into. Want to make a new notebook? No problem — the script has a “Create New Notebook” button which will let you do that on the fly!

Automatic Growl detection has been added to Dan’s script, which will save you a trip to the Script Editor to enable/disable it.

Current Limitations and Open Issues

1. I never figured out how to successfully write the NetNewsWire item’s URL into Evernote’s “source URL” value without using the “create note from url” command. I chose to use the “create note from html” approach because the results were sometimes more visually appealing once the note arrived into Evernote. I am hopeful that this will eventually be possible; Working Properly in Version 1.01!
2. A batch archive of the Read Items in a subscription folder isn’t picking up the correct count. Not really sure what’s going on there, so I’ve disabled that portion of the script until I get it sorted out;
3. Some Growl weirdness when using the iPhone Mini skin;
4. Errors that will surely arise when you do something that I didn’t think of or test for!

How to Install and Use

Just drop it into the NetNewsWire Script Folder!

FastScript link and support

Do yourself a favor and download and install FastScripts from Red Sweater. Triggering the script from the keyboard really supercharges the process — you’ll watch your news items practically fly into Evernote with a few keystrokes! Here’s how you set it up:

• Copy script or an Alias to ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/NetNewsWire
• Set up your keyboard shortcut

For my workflow, I am using ⌘ E (as in Evernote) for the quick single post script shortcut and ⌘ SHIFT E for the batch script.

Source code and download link on the next page!

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