Automatically get Tweets to Evernote without using @myen

Evernote is a tool I use practically every single day. I love the versatility of the system and its cross-platform availability as well as the fact that you can use it for free. One of the features I now take for granted are the variety of ways you can get information into Evernote.

1. Create a new note in a one of the client applications (Mac/PC/Web/mobile device).
2. Send clipboard or selection using keyboard shortcuts.
3. Drag & drop (or send to in Windows) of files into client.
4. From a web browser using a toolbar (button) add on or a bookmarklet.
5. E-mail to a special Evernote e-mail address.
6. Via a script using ENScript.
7. Via a third party system (e.g. ReQall).

The more astute may at this point be screaming at me about Twitter and the facility to tag tweets and send them to Evernote.  After all this post is supposed to be about Evernote and Twitter. Well compared to the other methods listed above Twitter comes up a little short for me.

The Limitations of Twitter
The fundamental limitation of Twitter is that Tweets have a maximum limit of 140 characters. Now there’s a bit of work involved in associating your Twitter and Evernote accounts and an additional requirement to include the “@myen” mention in in your tweet. This means that once you include a spacer as well you’re going to be down to 134 characters. It doesn’t sound like much of a decrease, but every character counts when you have such a small character limit to begin with.

The next limitation for me is that I don’t necessarily want people to know what I’m putting into Evernote. I realise that Twitter is a public communication channel, but I’d rather not publicise that I’m capturing a particular tweet into Evernote as people may read into that. This may seem a little overly paranoid, but I’m sure that everyone can think of a situation where someone read something between the lines that wasn’t there.

Lastly and probably most importantly I’m not sure I can always remember to add @myen to tweets when I want to store them in Evernote.

Why Tweet to Evernote?
So at this point I asked myself why would I want to send information into Evernote by a tweet? I managed to come up with two – but if you think of any others please leave a comment on this post.

The first is not one I’ve ever needed myself, but you can send an SMS to Twitter which means that if you don’t have a smart phone but you do have a mobile then you can send yourself a note into Evernote via SMSing to Twitter.  The alternative for me with this would be that many cell network providers (certainly in the UK) as well as other third party services allow you to send SMS messages to an e-mail address. You could then SMS directly into Evernote – so there is an alternative.

The second reason is one which I find much more relevant and that is to archive my tweets so that I can search through them alongside my other information within Evernote. But if I’m looking at archiving then my hoarding instinct comes out and my approach will be to archive everything I tweet.

Evertweet
So when it comes down to Twitter and Evernote I decided that I want to get every single tweet I make into Evernote without having to remember to add @myen to it. In order to do this I need three things.

• A way to get my tweets out of Twitter in a suitable format for import into Evernote.
• A way to import my tweets into Evernote.
• A way to automate the export and import process.

The solution is to use Twitter’s RSS feed feature to get the tweets out, the private e-mail address for my Evernote account to receive the tweets and an RSS to e-mail service to automate the whole process.

Most RSS to mail services allow daily mailing of RSS feeds and FeedMyInbox is probably the most well known service to do this, currently offering up to five RSS feeds for free. This will give you a daily digest of tweets direct into your default Evernote notebook.  FeedMyInbox also offers paid for accounts that allow you to specify when during the day to receive the digest as well as the option to send RSS updates in (almost) real time. So if your willing to part with a little bit of cash then you can get more control.

I have tried Xfruits as an alternative to this as it provides a wide range of free RSS related tools and an hourly feed option all for free. Unfortunately the regularity of the hourly feed has been more like twelve-hourly. If you find any other free services with a more frequent cycle do let me know.

So once you register for an appropriate RSS to e-mail service it’s just a case of configuring it to use your Twitter account’s RSS feed (available on your Twitter page), your Evernote account’s e-mail address (available in your Evernote client’s account settings or online in your Evernote web settings) and setting the frequency. One thing to bear in mind is that when you register for an RSS to e-mail service then you are likely to receive a confirmation of e-mail address mail … which will arrive in your default Evernote notebook- so remember to check that rather than your regular e-mail mailbox.

So that’s all there is to it. 140 characters of information delivered direct to your Evernote account from Twitter at regular intervals with no need to remember to add @myen to your tweets.

My Wish List for Apple iPhone OS 4.0

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Nokia E71 – Exchange Password Reset

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Scan to Evernote (without Fujitsu ScanSnap)

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Apple Rumour: iPhone Touch Sensitive Back

A day or two ago Bloomberg published an article that featured a rumor that the next generation iPhone might conceivably include a touch sensitive back like Apple’s latest magic mouse.  This surely has to be some sort of joke?

Apple are experienced designers and whilst not everyone might like the new touch sensitive mouse design it is functional.  Would Apple really add a touch sensitive back to the phone?  In my opinion, only if they hadn’t really considered the fact that people use cases and transfers.

There are a great number of people who choose protective and/or stylish cases for their expensive iPhones and since they are so popular some people go a little further and add stickers or transfers to the back of the device to be able to identify it from another person’s phone.  Whilst in a similar way to screen protectors I think it should be possible to produce a compatible transfer that enables the touch to work, I still can’t help but think that cases might still result in a bit of an issue should Apple have opted for this feature.

Do you think Apple will do this?  If they do is it the right decision?  I guess that there’s a good chance we may get a clue in a few weeks time when Apple make some announcements on the 26th January.

Excel 2007 Hyperlink Limitation

For a couple of years now I’ve been pulling IT service desk statistics into a spreadsheet and setting up worksheets to break down and analyse the data in various ways.  The number of worksheets has subsequently grown a significant amount and I wanted to create a front worksheet that contained hyperlinks to and brief descriptions for each of the subsequent worksheets.

This is straight forward to do in Excel.  Press CTRL+K to bring up the hyperlink dialog and select the “Place in this document” set and then just select the worksheet you want the hyperlink to link to.  The issue I discovered was that this really does only apply to worksheets.  I had several chart sheets inserted into the workbook and these were not being listed in the hyperlink options.

As a result I’ve copied the charts from each of the chart sheets and pasted them as items on new worksheets.  An inelegant solution, but a practical one that doesn’t involve adding a macro to do the job.

Finding the size of a Microsoft Office 2007 file

Prior to Microsoft Office 2007 (MSO2007), office provided a quick and simple way to find out just how big your file was.  This was done by selecting the properties option from the file menu which then displayed the same file properties dialog box that you could select from the file in Windows Explorer.

In MSO2007 the information is still available, but has been annoyingly ‘hidden’ somewhat deeper in the application.  In fact it is so awkwardly hidden that I know many people have not come across how to access it … so I thought I’d share.

Along with the menu item click options I’ve included the accelerator / shortcut keys to help make this as quick as possible.

1. Select the ‘Office button’ [ALT+F].
2. Select the ‘Prepare’ menu item [Press E].
3. Select the ‘Properties’ menu item [Press P].
4. In the ‘Document Properties’ section that appears, click the title (“Document Properties”) of the section to reveal a drop down list containing just one item – ‘Advanced Properties’.  Select this item to display the file properties.

NB: Please keep in mind that until you save a file, the properties window will not provide a file size though other file properties may be populated.

Evernote Keyboard Shortcuts

I was going to spend some time today compiling a list of keyboard shortcuts for Evernote.  I’d had a look around some time ago and been unable to find much out there, but before I began I thought I’d have another check.  This time I found a link to a PDF on site mistywindows.com that does a superb job of describing the available shortcut keys.

• Download mistywindows.com Evernote Shortcuts PDF.

Get Value from the Text Function in Excel

I’ve been doing a little bit more work with some spreadsheets recently and I came across a situation where I needed to work with a date and carry out a comparison to a string of text.  My first attempt fell short as it wouldn’t get the value I wanted, but Excel’s TEXT() function came to my rescue.

The issue came about like this.  I wanted to take a date in the format “dd/mm/yyyy” in one cell and display it in a short date format of “mmm-yy” in the cell next to it.

e.g.  “07/01/2010” in cell A1 and “Jan-10” in the neighbouring cell A2.

My original approach was to set the second cell to pick up the value of the first.  So taking the example above A1 would contain “07/01/2010” and cell A2 would contain a formula “=A1”.  I then set the formatting on cell A2 to a custom format “mmm-yy”.

I next wanted to check if cell A2 was equal to “Jan-10”.  This was where the issue arose as although cell A2 displays “Jan-10” its value is actually “07/01/2010″ … the value in cell A1.

The solution was to set the formatting of the A2 cell back to ‘general’ and then change its formula to… =TEXT(A1,”mmm-yy”)

The value of cell A2 is then “Jan-10”.

For me this highlights the difference between the content (what is typed into the cell, i.e. the formula), the value (what the formula evaluates to), and what is displayed (the value can be formatted to change how the user sees it on screen/printed).

Top FlagIT Posts of 2009

It’s been about a year since I started blogging here and whilst it was primarily supposed to be a site for quick useful tech-related posts several have grown into far larger posts.  Whilst some posts have remained somewhat quiet on the number of reads others have generated far more interest than I could have expected.

It’s actually five more days until this blog is a year old, but I thought that new year’s day might be as good an opportunity to review what the top ten posts were.  This has been based on the number of visits from more than six and a quarter thousand since the blog was created.

10. Reclaim more Memory on a Windows Mobile Device

Posted: 04/04/2009

Reads: 95 (Daily Average 0.35)

Windows mobile phones have a finite amount of memory and like any operating system (particularly M$ ones?) memory leaks can stop memory being released.  This post highlights how to resolve some storage issues with the Mobile Opera browser and a useful tool for reclaiming that memory lost to leakage.

9. Simple Template Workaround for Evernote

Posted: 21/11/2009

Reads: 95 (Daily Average 2.32)

A relatively recent post about one of my favourite pieces of software (Evernote) and how to use a simple bit of scripting to create templates in Evernote.

8. A Ceiling Function for VBScript

Posted: 31/07/2009

Reads: 133 (Daily Average 0.86)

This post includes some VBS code to round a number off to the greatest integer.

7. Developer Tabs and Drop Down Lists in Word 2007

Posted: 17/03/2009

Reads: 135 (Daily Average 0.47)

This post explains how to access the developer tab in Microsoft Word 2007 and briefly discusses some of the shortcomings of the drop down lists it offers.

6. VBScript – Count Occurrences in a Text String

Posted: 30/07/2009

Reads: 148 (Daily Average 0.95)

Another simple bit of VBS code that counts the number of instances of a string of text within another string of text.

5. Omnia to Oblivia (and back)

Posted: 05/04/2009

Reads: 151 (Daily Average 0.56)

I have a Samsung Omnia mobile phone and have had a number of issues with it.  This describes how I resolved one of the most difficult issues with the file system constantly mounting and dismounting a storage device.

4. A Flexible Progress Window in VBScript

Posted: 19/07/2009

Reads: 169 (Daily Average 1.02)

Another popular bit of VBS code is some that builds a customisable progress window based around dynamically updating a web page that is automatically loaded into a browser.  The progress window allows the user to display messages and progress bars.

3. VBScript – Select a Folder

Posted: 28/03/2009

Reads: 278 (Daily Average 1.00)

The most popular VBS code post on the blog in the past year this one shows how to access a common dialog to select a folder and pass this back to the main code.

2. Controlling Spotify

Posted: 29/07/2009

Reads: 1172 (Daily Average 7.51)

At this point we see a big change in the number of reads of the posts.  This particular post’s popularity is most likely related to the popularity of Spotify.  The post describes a way in which an iPhone emulator can be used on a PC running Microsofrt Windows PC to control Spotify installed on an Apple Mac.

1. Excel – Dynamic Drop Down Lists with Full Validation

Posted: 15/03/2009

Reads: 1272 (Daily Average 4.36)

At the top spot is a post relating to Microsoft Excel.  It looks at how to overcome some of the limitations on dynamically populated drop down lists.  There are a number of other Excel related posts on the blog that people may find useful in combination with this and it has certainly made quite an impact with some of the spreadsheets I’ve developed for colleagues at work.  It seems as though that popularity is spreading to hundreds of others across the Internet.

So please have a look through these top ten (and others if you like) and I’d encourage you to leave a comment or rate the post.  If you like the content why not subscribe to one of the RSS feeds?