AppleScript: Open A Bunch Of Links In Safari

I recently judged the American Wine Blog Awards. My list of nominees came as a spreadsheet with the URLs of the blogs and their names, grouped by category. Because there were 30 or more nominations in some categories, I didn’t want to open each link individually in Safari. I turned to my old friend and nemesis: AppleScript.

It took a bit of online sleuthing to figure out the quirks in Safari’s dictionary, but I eventually got a script that opens a set of URLs, each in its own tab, in a new window. I’ve included it below for anyone who might find it useful. It works well enough, given that I only needed to run it 8 times. It’s pretty brain dead as it is: There is no error checking and you have to have the URLs in a return-delimited list, which is what you get when you copy URLs out of a column in Excel. If you run it, you’ll also notice that it opens an extra tab at the “beginning” of the new window. If it bothered me, I would figure out how to remove the tab, but for 8 runs I could just click the close box. I only tested it on Mac OS X 10.5 and Safari 3.0.

set clipText to the clipboard

set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {"
"}
set urlList to text items of clipText
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {""}
tell application "Safari"
 set newDoc to make new document
 set currWindow to front window
 repeat with currentURL in urlList
  make new tab at the end of tabs in currWindow with properties {URL:currentURL}
 end repeat
end tell

Writing I Like: Nicholson Baker Writes About Wikipedia

I think I’ve liked every piece of Nicholson Baker nonfiction that I’ve ever read, but I thought I would call out his piece about Wikipedia for my new-and-exciting Writing I Like category. Ostensibly, the essay is a review of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, but in true NYT Review of Books fashion, that’s a lightweight skeleton supporting the piece’s muscle.

Baker has whole battlefronts of conflict at his disposal to spice up his piece: He paints the modern-day Wikipedia as an mostly-unseen war between the keepers of the encyclopedic truth and its would-be spammers and trolls. Even within the legitimate ranks, he finds tension: There are aggressive purgers debating against article inclusionists. (And, really, is it any surprise that the author of Double Fold sides with the “let’s include everything” camp?) There is even his conflict between his life as a newly enthusiastic Wikipedia editor and his life as a father and husband with household obligations.

But this piece really shines with its use of specifics. Baker has a finely tuned eye for detail backed by an obsessive knowledge-seeking mind. Consider his accounts of Wikipedia vandalism:

Some articles are vandalized a lot. On January 11, 2008, the entire fascinating entry on the aardvark was replaced with "one ugly animal"; in February the aardvark was briefly described as a "medium-sized inflatable banana."

He doesn’t bother cracking jokes. Who needs to with source material such as this?

As with the Wired piece about the Netflix Prize, Baker’s piece shines because of his presence in the piece (a more overt presence than that of the writer of the Netflix piece). He talks about how he got drawn in to Wikipedia editing, the battles he won (and lost) to keep articles in the system, the addictive pull of debates with other editors and conflicts with vandals.

I finished the piece feeling a little lighter, a little happier, and a little more inclined to edit Wikipedia articles.

Writing I LIke: Wired's Psychologist And The Netflix Prize

I spend a lot of time here griping about laughable published writing that shouldn’t have slipped past an editor’s red pen. Let’s look a piece that makes me smile in a good way: Wired’s piece about an English psychologist/operations engineer who has rocketed up the leaderboard for the Netflix prize, a $1 million reward for anyone who can improve the company’s recommendation system by 10 percent.

First of all, hats off to the author, Jordan Ellenberg, for distilling complex math into a usable form for the smart, but not expert, reader. Ellenberg is a mathematician in his own right, and he summarizes the high-math concepts used by the competitors into common English, using analogies to illustrate his points. As someone who increasingly finds himself writing technical, “wine geek” wine pieces for a mainstream, layperson audience, I am impressed by his skill.

But the biggest draw of this piece is the compelling narrative: A classic “little guy beats the big guy” scenario. Good fiction, which is the model for narrative non-fiction, revolves around conflict, and the author has rightfully used the inherent battle — a single psychologist and his high-school daughter, the math consultant, trouncing teams of math and computer science professionals working with sophisticated programs — as the axis of his piece. From conflict comes crisis, the boiling point, and Ellenberg provides it with the current status: all the contestants close to the final prize from a numerical point of view, but very far from a realistic point of view. Ideally, one wants a resolution as well, but that remains in the future, an acceptable ending for a newsy narrative nonfiction piece.

The author doesn’t lock himself into this story, though. “Digress often, but never for long,” reads one of the few axioms laid out in the classic The Art and Craft of Feature Writing. Ellenberg spins a quick history of Netflix, a brief description of the prize, a look into the minds of the Netflix statisticians, the surprising collaboration of the competing groups, and more, all through short digressions that linger just long enough: As soon as you start to think, “Get back to the psychologist!” he does.

My final point — though there are other things to like in this piece — is that Ellenberg allows himself to be in the piece. Feature wells don’t often permit first-person narrative for obvious reasons: Too much first-person, and the reader begins to wonder why s/he should care about the writer so much. Among my clients, only The Art of Eating finds it natural, though others allow it when it makes a difference. But Ellenberg sometimes steps away from his story to give his own view: “He refers to the psychological model underlying their mathematical approach as ‘crude.’ His tone suggests that if I weren’t taping, he might use a stronger word.” Ellenberg exposes himself to the reader, but in doing so draws a more detailed picture of the person you actually care about. And he doesn’t forget to show and not tell, though he has a harder time in his straightforward reporting sections: Small details like the notebook and the elderly Dell allow the reader to paint a more vivid picture.

I might try to incorporate a bit more color and rhythm into the prose, were I writing this, but the story is good enough that only someone looking for nits will drill down on that.