You may have noticed that my ‘Around the web’ posts have gotten a little longer in the past few weeks. The reason for this isn’t that I’m reading more or seeing more interesting tid bits on a weekly basis, it is mainly due to an improved toolset. I’ve set up a couple of scripts that make it really easy for me to save links during the week.

I have a task I use to store the draft for my ‘Around the web’ post during the week, then I post it to my blog every Sunday using the ‘post to WordPress’ feature. Most of the time, I’ll be in NetNewsWire when I see something I’d like to link to, other times I’ll be in my browser. Every once in a while I’ll get links via e-mail, but usually I won’t decide to link to them until I’ve opened the URL in the browser.

Sam DeVore created a nifty AppleScript to make a new task from an e-mail in Mail.app. I used that as a base and modified it to work as I wanted to in NetNewsWire.

Here are the scripts I use for creating a new task from a news item or web page, or to append a link to that URL in an existing task (from NetNewsWire or from Camino or Safari). These should work fine with Tasks Pro™, Tasks 2.x or a Use Tasks account.

• NetNewsWire to Tasks AppleScripts (.zip 9kB)
• JavaScript Bookmarklets

Note: You’ll have to edit the scripts directly to set the URL of your Tasks installation (and the ID of the task you want to append to, if applicable).