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

UPDATED ON OCTOBER 13, 2009

Description

Despite it’s recent hiccups, NetNewsWire continues to be one of my primary web browsers. In both my consulting practice and as a writer, I’m probably spending more time reading feeds than doing any traditional browsing around the web. For me — and I expect for you as well — it’s important to be able to have a way to keep track of items I read 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.

In the year since I cobbled together the “Single Item NetNewsWire / Evernote Exporter”, I’ve revised it several times. It has become my “bread-and-butter script” and I use it all day long to quickly tag and file things as I read them.

At the same time as I first wrote that script, I realized that (due to some limitations with NNW’s current AppleScript implementation) it wouldn’t be the right tool to archive a bunch of notes at once. Luckily, I remembered that Dan Byler had written a superb script to archive a bunch of feed items into DEVONThink (another part of my workflow). I adapted it to work with Evernote — but over the past year, I haven’t shown it the same amount of updating attention as the Single Item script.

Until now!

Features and Updates

With this script, you can do a batch archive from NetNewsWire of:

• All Items in a selected Folder;
• The Unread Items in a selected Folder;
• The contents of the Flagged Items Folder;
• **NEW** Export a List of the URLs of your Open Tabs

I have updated the dialog boxes for tag support (which lets you tag items on the way into Evernote) and also for the alphabetized list of your current Evernote Notebooks that allows 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!

The script automatically detects if Growl is running, which will save you a trip to the Script Editor to enable/disable it.

For this revision, I’ve disabled some of the confirmation/warning boxes because I felt that they slowed things down. The AppleScript “plumbing” for it still remains in the script so, if you want it back, you can edit out the comment marks around those portions and turn it back on.

Current Limitations and Open Issues

1. 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!

If you’re importing a lot of items, I’d recommend that you change a few settings inside Evernote before beginning the import. In the “Clipping” tab of the Preferences menu, uncheck the boxes in the section called “After a clip:”

If the boxes are checked while importing a large number of items, Evernote will fill your screen with open windows and sound like it is repeatedly shooting you with a laser from a 70’s Sci-Fi movie. Trust me — uncheck the boxes first and you’ll be much happier! 😉

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!