Siri Shortcut: Send Discourse Forum Posts to OmniFocus
Several podcasts I listen to and apps that I use on a regular basis are using Discourse to form online communities to promote discussion related to the shows and apps. These communities are much better than Facebook groups and help organize topics and conversations in a logical manner. Over the past couple months I’ve found myself posting and interacting with others in the group and am gaining a lot of value hearing others perspectives, giving my opinions, and obtaining help for problems that I face. I check in these groups throughout the day and make note of the conversations that are happening. What I’ve found is that oftentimes there is a post I want to respond to but I don’t have the time to respond at that moment. Instead of trying to remember that I need to respond and or want to go back and read a post, I decided this would be good to utilize OmniFocus.
The four Discourse forums I commonly participate in (with links to them):
- Automators Podcast
- Drafts App
- Focused Podcast - This is a subgroup of the MPU Discourse Forum
- Mac Power Users Podcast
I first started by clicking on the link to the post to bring up the share sheet and send the link to OmniFocus. Every time I went through the steps of renaming the action, moving the link to the note field, adding tags (somewhat inconsistently), and then saving.
Of course there had to be a better way so I opened up Siri Shortcuts to create a workflow. This workflow has several different steps (scroll down to see the entire shortcut).
The first action (get name) gets the name of the webpage from the URL. In Discourse (even within the iOS app) it is the title of the forum post.
UPDATE: I’ve added an action that removes ” from the title field and replaces it with an actual quote.
The second set of actions utilizes choose from list action. I’ve learned after working with Siri Shortcuts for a little while how to better use this action. First, I use the text action and type in the different forums that this could be. I will use this as one of my OmniFocus tags. As you can see there are four main forums that I converse in. You, of course, can easily edit this for your own needs (Automators Podcast, Drafts App, Focused Podcast, and Mac Power Users Podcast). The second action with this is the split text action, which makes sure that each item is on its own line. Since this creates a list, I use the choose from list action to select the forum.
The third set of actions uses the choose from list action again but this time I want to delineate between if I want to just go back and read this post/replies or respond to it. This will be used as my action word at the front of my OmniFocus task.
The Nothing action may or not need to be there (?) but using it works and doesn’t break anything so that’s why I have it there. My thinking is that this separates the actions from the final action and doesn’t send any input into the last action that I don’t want.
Finally, through the use of Magic Variables I’m ready to create my OmniFocus task via the Add OmniFocus Item action:
- The name of the action consists of the “Read” or “Respond to” prompt for my action word.
- The second Magic Variable is the Get Name action, which is the name of the topic.
- The Context (or Tags…this still needs to be updated!) is Discourse Forums and the name of the forum that I chose. In OmniFocus I have a perspective that utilizes these tags so I can see my list of items to go through in Discourse quickly.
- Finally, the Notes field of the task is the Shortcut Input, which is the URL to the post. I then have a Ask When Run prompt that allows me to type in any other information I would like.
UPDATE: I add an action to open the Discourse app again since that is where I originally grab the link.
That’s it! It’s a pretty simple Shortcut but one I find helpful for managing my time and not sorting through and trying to remember what posts I want to respond to or read.
You can download the updated shortcut here.
