Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated? - babayaga_
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paulrpotts
I have semi-automated the process of creating XML files for podcast episodes
and tagging the MP3 files for upload.

I'm using BBEdit and bash on MacOS X to do both; I have a "worksheet" which is
like the old Macintosh Programmer's Worksheet, if anyone remembers those -
it's a text document in which you can select text and execute it as a shell
command, and the results are piped back into the document.

It's "semi-automated" because I have a block of boilerplate text for each
episode, and I type out the text for a short and long title, filename, and
info fields. These go into bash variables. Then I just select the lines one by
one and execute them. This allows me to sanity-check the results. Then I can
just copy and paste the block of generated XML for each episode, paste it into
the staging feed file, sync it via FTP, test the staging feed to verify that I
can download the episode and that the tags all look correct, then, when I'm
satisfied with it, put the XML in the production feed file.

This saves me a considerable amount of hand-editing of the XML and MP3 file
metadata, which is quite error-prone. "Fully automated" was not really going
to help in this case since very likely that would just automatically publish
metadata and XML with errors.

------
landa
I kept forgetting my keys at work, so I automated my lock. You can see it in
action here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-9hKzVNNs0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-9hKzVNNs0)

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digital_voodoo
This is great! Could you please provide any instructions on how you achieved
it?

