Services in Snow Leopard – Creating a Posterous Service
This is a quick tutorial demonstrating one of my favorite features in Snow Leopard – the services menu. I discovered Posterous not too long ago and have decided to create a quick service for posting selected text to my Posterous blog.
If you haven’t taken a look at Posterous yet, you might want to! It allows you to create posts (and update many of your social media sites, too) by sending an email.
Fire up Automator
Click on the Service button
The ability to create services in automator is a new feature of Snow Leopard.
Copy the selected text to the clipboard
Set the “Services receives selected” drop-down option to text and add the Copy to Clipboard action to your workflow. You can find it under the Utilities category.
Get the post title
We’re going to use the Ask for Text action to request a title for the blog post. You can either find it under the Text category or just search your entire library for the phrase. Right click on the step after you’ve added it and choose to Ignore input. In the screenshot above, I’ve entered a prompt for the popup and a default answer as well.
Save the text you enter in the previous step as a variable
Posterous uses the subject of the email you send as the blog title, so we need a way to take the text we entered in the step above as our subject. The easiest way to do that is by saving a variable.
Get the text you copied to the clipboard and add it to a new email message
Add the Get Contents of Clipboard action to your workflow. Right click on it and choose to Ignore Input. Next, drag over the New Mail Message action and enter an email address of post@{yourusername}.posterous.com
The text you just copied to the clipboard will automatically be added as the email message, but we still need to enter a subject. Click and drag the blog-title variable that you created and drop it in the Subject field.
In the Account drop down list, make sure to choose the address that you’ve registered with Posterous!
Finish up
From here, you could add an action to automatically send the email, but I’d rather have the option to add/edit my post first so I will leave that out.
When you save the service, you’ll be able to highlight any text, right-click, and choose the Posterous action from the available services menu!
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