A couple weeks ago Macdrifter had a nice post about automating FTP uploads with Hazel, Dropbox, and Python. It’s a similar idea to the setup I’ve been using to automate my MultiMarkdown workflow, but the main reason it grabbed my interest was this line:
I really like Transmit for FTP, but it seemed a little heavy handed for Hazel automation.
He’s right. Using Transmit for the FTP portion of my process was a poor decision. It just happened to be the only way I knew how, and scripting the FTP upload didn’t even occur to me at the time (there’s a reason for the name of this site).
After reading his post, I decided to swap out the slow and clunky Transmit portion of my Hazel rule with some fancy code. One problem. I don’t know anything about Python[1], and the 3 hours I spent trying to get up to speed were futile and fruitless.
Since I’ve dabbled a bit with Bash, I decided to see if there was an equivalent way to accomplish the same tasks. After a bit of searching, and a lot of trial and error (again, read the name of the site), I came up with this:
HOST=ftp.DOMAIN.com
USER=myUserName
PASS=myPassword
JNAME= \ basename $1\
ftp -inv $HOST << EOF
user $USER $PASS
put "$1" "$JNAME"
EOF
echo "http://dansturm.com/$JNAME" >> /Users/PATH/Dropbox/PATH/UPLOADS_LOG_FILE.txt
It’s faster than the Transmit method. It works more often than the Transmit method. And it even records the URL of the uploaded file to a text file in my Dropbox (my favorite idea from the Macdrifter post). I also have the Hazel rule change the file name to all lowercase and swap spaces for underscores, something is already performed in my Text to HTML conversion rule, but now the FTP rule can be used stand-alone as well as in conjunction with the MultiMarkdown process.
It has no error reporting, and you can’t even really tell it’s running (save for the evidence in the log file), but it’s way better than what I was using. Many thanks to Macdrifter for this one.
But…
I’m happy I was able to improve my exiting tools, and learn a few things in the process, but now that I’ve migrated this blog to Squarespace, I’m not sure how much I’ll actually use them considering Squarespace doesn’t support FTP access, and my home site doesn’t need updating very often.