I've been enamoured by Groff lately and having incremental changes to text files using different scripts. This new-found interest in using text files led me to start writing all my social media posts in one text file.
If you manage social media at your work, or at a volunteer organization, then you know that creating a week's worth of content can be a lot of clicking and typing, even if you use Hootsuite. I found it faster to write all my posts in a single text document, and then copy and paste each completed post into Hootsuite at the end (after running aspell, of course!).
The problem was, I had to copy and paste every URL from the text file to Bit.ly to shorten the URLs and then either paste them back into the file, then copy and paste the post into Hootsuite, or paste the post into Hootsuite and then paste in a shortened URL.
Either way, the experience left something to be desired. I realized that having a script that replaces all the URLs in the text file with shortened URLs would be much faster. That's why I've made AutoBitly.
Now all I have to do is run:
python autobitly.py <name of textfile>
And all the URLs are shortened automatically! The script is not complicated, but it will save me a lot of time. This is also the first script I've published on the internet, so please get in touch if the documentation is lacking, or something does not work.
Check out the repo on GitLab!