nikivi

I like to make mind maps with MindNode and this app allows to export mind map's contents to markdown. Before I used @vitor's super awesome script to simply read the markdown file but it was a bit slow opening large files with links.

Following @deanishe's advice, I made this tool that will essentially turn a markdown with links that you often get from MindNode into a CSV which is insanely fast to access with list filter. 

Here is the GitHub repo with download of the command.

As bonus, here is a markdown file with > 100 links of subreddits which with this command outputs a really clean CSV that you can use with Alfred. 

I hope to improve it soon so it parses this 500 links file with books too. 

Hope you like it. ?

Not sure if it is related, but after running this file action. The script to get current URL from Safari :

tell application "Safari" to return URL of front document 

Started failing. I did restart my laptop and it works again though. 

Alfred is amazing. ?

I understand. I was thinking, perhaps Github Trending also has an RSS feed. Would be awesome to add. 

Will break the cool name you have there though.

This is really awesome. Thank you @vitor.

I think for hacker news the workflow lacks up vote count so its best to use web version but for pinboard, this is really awesome. ?

I have decoupled learn anything and 'my mind' workflows. Now they are two separate workflows.

1. My Mind  workflow : which has a neat screencast I made to show the power of the workflow.

1. Learn Anything : which also has a neat screencast.

There are three improvements I will soon make to it. One is I will write a MD > CSV converter and have that be read by Alfred in List Filter like Learn Anything has. And two, learn anything will default results to our search engine instead of mindnode. And finally I am still not sure if @vitor's AutoUpdater works for me. I have updated it to use the correct values but have no idea how to test since it needs a week or something for it to trigger. I also still really prefer Dropbox over GitHub releases because I can't find a fast way to release the workflow.

I hope you like it. ?

Thank you @vitor for these interesting points. To answer the question about me caring whether someone remembers me, you are right, it is a silly thing to do. 

There are two projects here really. First is the 'Learn anything' search engine which will soon be completely moderated and extended by the community similar to awesome lists. Although what gets included in the database will be quite strict to keep it from being visually overwhelming. And I think it has a lot of potential for success and will evolve with the changes similar to wikipedia or the like. It is just a database of links connected together with arrows focused on learning in a linear way.

As for this workflow. This workflow is what I use currently for my own personal productivity. Reason I want to share it, is because I think other people can appreciate the speed with which they can potentially do things. Currently it's just a framework for the future that I plan to develop. The idea is to leverage another person's 'knowledge' or 'expertise' in a way that is easily accessible. For now it's mostly bookmarks, links, and things I personally use to move and learn things faster.

But once again, this is just a framework for the future that I am experimenting with. The idea is to have a very 'transparent' setup that all can use, if they care enough.

Alfred my Mind

This workflow lets you search through entirety of my personal wiki, all the articles I wrote and GitHub repositories, as well as GitHub Gists I share and a lot more.

You can read why I made the workflow here.

As this workflow is focused and optimised for fast access to all the knowledge and references I have indexed. It is adised you read through some parts of my here first.

My goals with sharing both this workflow and my wiki knowledge base is to extend my idea of knowledge bootstrapping and tapping into a person's expertise in the most transparent way possible.

For more information, on how you can use the workflow, you can read the GitHub readme.

Hope you like it. ?

Code | Download

I have really minimised this workflow. Now there are only two list filters. One that allows you to jump to any of the 300+ mind maps from Learn Anything and one for going inside certain mind maps. Most notably books, courses, research papers and my personal bookmark list (which I will transfer soon).

The speed of opening any mind map is instant too. We are also soon releasing our own mind map render for our search engine that will allow for much faster mind map render times and an always present search bar. I really think it will be incredible.

Here is the download for the workflow. ?

Big big thank you to @vitor and @deanishe without whom this workflow would not have existed in its current form. ?

I am also attempting to release my first workflow with actual code in it although I am not too successful in that regard.

I decided to focus on the search engine.  

It is available for all after all. Not sure if I still need the workflow with this.

Also there is some interest in this idea after all.

46 minutes ago, dfay said:

Just remember the immortal (actually three week old) words of Jason Snell, "nobody grades you on the scaffolding."  From reading this thread, it really looks like you had an idea that worked with a few files but which cannot be made to scale.  Why struggle with it when there are ready-made tools that can be easily adapted to do what you want?  Have you looked at DevonThink?

I have looked into DevonThink. For me mind maps are a lot more elegant way of transcribing information. I can both find and open any mind from ~ 3000 of them in a second. I can also index search for all mind maps in the collection : 

Thus I have a full digital library of links and notes. The fact that I can share it is pretty amazing too as I actually love using the web version of these mind maps. And I actually use this workflow quite often thus I will improve on it more in time.

46 minutes ago, dfay said:

it really looks like you had an idea that worked with a few files but which cannot be made to scale.

And I disagree with you in that this idea cannot scale. I find that it scales extremely well because if mind map gets to be too large, I can break it down into smaller pieces, all well connected. Fun fact: originally it was all a big giant mind map.

I only wish that more people did get to take a look at this and pointed out the inaccuracies in how the content is structured and connected. I am certain there are many as I sadly do not have expertise on all of the things.

This project also elegantly solved a big problem of mine with bookmarks. I have a lot of bookmarks saved in safari. This is just one folder from it : 

I even had to find a way to quickly jump to the folder I needed so I developed a 'prefixing' method which I use for everything now : 

But finding and retrieving information from these folders is quite a pain even with fast alfred workflow. With these mind maps I can actually structure links in a way that 'makes sense' (at least for me). Plus I hope it would save time for other people in finding interesting information as most people bookmark very similar things.

But already there is insane value that this project brings. Once I figure out how to recurse well through the entirety of the mind map with help of @deanishe's workflow. It would be pretty sweet.

I have updated the workflow with @vitor's OneUpdater. I hope it works. I also added 'reddit' subreddit search in the 'inside' search filter. It is quite fast and I will add more subreddits later. 

14 hours ago, deanishe said:

Aren't you studying computer science? Do you not know what recursion is?

I do know what recursion is. It's just that I can't figure out how to apply it in this case. I will try again though and see how I can work this out. Don't need to be mean.

2 hours ago, dfay said:

Basically it looks like you're trying to reinvent the wiki, and honestly I think you'd do much better to use an off-the-shelf solution like WIkidot, where all this infrastructure is taken care of for you and you can concentrate on content. Wikidot has a decent API & it would be pretty easy to build a workflow that queries it.  Or you could use mediawiki & adapt the existing Wikipedia workflows.

The biggest problems I find with wikis is discoverability. These mind maps are mostly a bookmark manager of mine that I think would be useful for others too. I don't really hold content there (like wikis do), I only host links (and connect them with arrows). Plus I try to create a 'guided' way people can get any information they want. That is I try to show what the most efficient path for learning a topic is.

Google is a black box in that you have to know what you want to ask. This mind map actually lets users explore and see how everything connects on the grand scheme of things. At least that's the plan.

5 hours ago, vitor said:

Again, you’re taking the long route. You’re overcomplicating. You are already pushing your workflow updates to Github, just push the compiled workflow as well. Its download link won’t change, like it does with Dropbox.

 

Dropbox sucks for this, and it’ll just keep sucking more. They are incredibly and increasingly hostile to hotlinking. At this point in time (and likely in the future) Dropbox sucks for distributing software. And they know it. They crippled those features on purpose.

Thank you @vitor. You are right, I did overcomplicate things. I will pass in the workflow as I update. I have a small question though, what would my new 'download' hyperlink point to then? Can I specify a specific file in GitHub to download? I don't really like dealing with GitHub releases if I can avoid that.

What do you mean by recursion? I can't recurse on anything as I have to by hand specify the exact url to pass the filter. Or am I missing something? It is just so messy. 

I really really wish there would be an easier way and I am certain there is one as @deanishe has many times shown. I mean in the worst case I can do this but I can't even search on 'notes' of objects thus I can't keep track of what I have added or what I have left.  

And since my mind map is very large, I will have 1000's of objects where with each new object, the performance drops significantly.

I really hope there is a better way to do this. I can't complete all of the mind map in this way, it will just get too large and slow.

If you want to test what is already possible to traverse, try 'tooling', then 'productivity', then 'alfred'.

Yay ?

I got it working (both the regex and the clean of query input). 

However now I don't know how to do this right at all. I hope what I am doing is not crazy. 

Also @vitor's markdown parser doesn't parse correctly on two files. Not really sure why. 

On this file, it doesn't give all results to Alfred. And on this one, it only shows this result : 

On second thought I can actually do something like this : 

Although I can't remember how to clean the query to empty after the filter and also for regex I will probably have (if does not contain 'mindnode', follow through). This should work I think.

But it will get really messy I feel. As certain mind maps go many levels deep. So I will need to build out this tree of filters and checks many times. Is there any other way to do this perhaps? 

Can someone help with how to best do this one thing. I want to improve this workflow so that users can traverse search through the mind map from Alfred.

For example in the big mind map there is a node 'mathematics'. And in mathematics node there are various links + more mind maps (indicated with ?).

Let's say user searches for 'math' in Alfred and presses on it. The contents of the mind map will be shown like this : 

Clicking on any of the links will go to the web page. However I want to make it so that clicking on results with ? will show the contents of that mind map. So if user was to pick this result from the list : 

Not the web page will be opened but the contents of that 'statistics' mind map. So this will be shown : 

I can't really think of a way to do this nicely. Is there even a way to do this painlessly? 

Here is updated workflow that includes markdowns in 'inside' folder. Specifically 'math.md' and 'stats.md'.

I would greatly appreciate any help on this as I really wish I can get this working.

56 minutes ago, deanishe said:

If I were you, I'd rename the folders and markdown file to match the category names, then write a script to generate JSON files that can be fed straight into Alfred via Script Filters. 

Thank you. I will try that approach.

And I just realised that my Ask, create, share workflow can be done a lot lot more efficient. Oh well, lesson learned.   

Here is a small workflow that allows you to search through a big list of tags from Pinboard.

Here is the download and here is GitHub repo of it.

It is just big list filter. If you want to add your own, you can. These are just ones that I think are pretty useful. I will update this list with more tags later as I only recently started using this.

I want to create a macro that will export a newly updated workflow and update the download path that I always put in beginning of workflows (this one).

Currently I distribute workflows with Dropbox and I can achieve a very fast release by using a keyboard maestro macro that will export the workflow to my Dropbox : 

Essentially I hover over a workflow in here : 

Press a hotkey, and it will export this workflow to Dropbox, replace the workflow there and the new updated workflow can be downloaded from the link.

This is pretty great and fast. However I want to use @vitor's amazing script to inform users that I released a new update to a workflow and for that I need to put the workflow at the root directory of the GitHub repo. I also noticed that all the workflow veterans put their workflows in the root GitHub repo like Searchio for example.

My question is whether I can achieve the same workflow of one hotkey press and everything is updated + the user is informed of the update with this setup? I can only think of having workflows exported to Desktop and then have hazel rules that will move the workflow to an appropriate place and then issue a git command update but that seems a bit excessive and I would need to create a new rule for each new workflow which sucks.

How do you guys release and update your workflows fast?

Also with this new workflow, the bug is gone completely. ?