A Day One bookmarklet for iOS
There is a promotion in the Apple App Store at the moment, giving away 10 apps for free to mark the 5 year anniversary of the App Store's launch.
One of the apps there is Day One, which I had heard some good things about, so decided to give it a whirl. And I like it.
One thing that I thought would be useful was a bookmarklet to send web pages from Safari into Day One entries. I had a quick look, but couldn't find anything. So I had a stab at building one myself.
This is the Day One URL scheme;
| Command | URL |
|---|---|
| Open Day One | dayone:// |
| Start an entry | dayone://post?entry="entry body" |
| Open Entries list | dayone://entries |
| Open Calendar | dayone://calendar |
| Open Starred | dayone://starred |
| Edit Entry | dayone://edit?entryId=[UUID] |
| Preferences | dayone://preferences |
And this is a bookmarklet I had previously made to work with the Drafts app;
javascript:window.location='drafts://x-callback-url/create?text='+encodeURIComponent(document.title+'\n')+encodeURIComponent(location.href)
To start with, I put the Day One URL into a very simple JavaScript bookmarklet;
javascript:window.location='dayone://post?entry="entry body"'
And it works- good start!
Taking the code from my Drafts bookmarklet to get the URL and page title gave me this;
javascript:window.location='dayone://post?entry="'+encodeURIComponent(document.title+'\n')+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'"'
Which also worked. So this is basically the same as my Drafts bookmarklet (but without the Actions to trigger).
I had a more complex Drafts bookmarklet which checks for selected text (only works on the iPad when the Bookmarks bar is visible - otherwise any text is deselected when you pull up the bookmarks menu) - switching the base URL gave me this (I've added line breaks to make it readabl here- you probably don't want them if you're using this bookmarklet yourself. Just copy/paste the code into a text editor and remove the line breaks so it is all on a single line.)
javascript:function%20
getSelText()%7Bvar%20txt=%27%27;
if(window.getSelection)%7Btxt=window.getSelection();%7D
else%20if(document.getSelection)%7Btxt=document.getSelection();%7D
else%20if(document.selection)%7Btxt=document.selection.createRange().text;%7D
else%20return%20%27%27;
return%20txt;%7D
var%20q=getSelText();
if(q!=%27%27)%7B
q='%3Cblockquote%3E%5Cn'+q+'%5Cn%3C%2Fblockquote%3E%5Cn';%7D
var%20l='dayone://post?entry='+'%5B'
+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'%5D%28'
+encodeURIComponent(location.href+'%29%5Cn');
if(!document.referrer)%7Br='';%7D
else%7Br='via%20'+encodeURIComponent(document.referrer);%7D
window.location=l+r+'%5Cn'+q+'%5Cn';
Which, to my surprise (once I had got rid of some stray commas and semicolons) worked!
With some text selected on a web page, this bookmarklet now opens Day One, creates an entry and populated it with the web page title (as a markdown link to the page URL) and any selected text in a blockquote HTML tag, and looks something like this;
Drafts and Safari bookmarklets — Some Random Nerd
It occurred to me that an app that plays so nicely with URL schemes (ie. sending things to other apps via their URL schemes) would probably have a scheme of its own for pulling things in. A little googling later and I found that you can; like this bookmarklet
Not a bad result at all - especially considering I managed to put it all together on my iPad on a 25 minute train journey.