I’ve sussed the Scrivener syncing issue by moving the process of converting out of the syncing folder (remember, not the actual project folder, but the ‘sync to external folder’). I then have created four automator applications to push my stuff to github in lovely markdown. Another thing I’ve learned today: when writing in Scrivener, just keep your formatting simple. Don’t use markdown syntax within Scrivener or your stuff on github will end up looking like this \##second-heading. I mean, it’s still legible, but not as legible as we’d like.

So – I have four robots. I write in Scrivener, keep my notes, close the session, whereupon it syncs rtf to the ‘external folder’ (in this case, my dropbox folder for this purpose; again, not the actual scrivener project folder).

1. I hit robot 1 on my desktop. Right now, this is called ‘abm-project-move-to-conversion-folder’. When I have a new project, I just open this application in Automator, and change the source directory to that project’s Scrivener external syncing folder. It grabs everything out of that folder, and copies it into a ‘conversion-folder’ that lives on my machine.
2. I hit robot 2, ‘convert-rtf-to-md’, which opens ‘conversion-folder’ and turns everything it finds into markdown. The conversion scripts live in the ‘conversion-folder’; the things to be converted live in a subfolder, conversion-folder/draft
3. I hit robot 3, ‘push-converted-files-to-github-repo’. This grabs just the markdown files, and copies them into my local github repository for the project. When I have a new project, I’d have to change this application to point to the new folder. This also overwrites anything with the same file name.
4. I hit robot 4, ‘clean-conversion-folder’ which moves everything (rtfs, mds,) to the trash. This is necessary because if not, then I can end up with duplicates of files I haven’t actually modified getting through my pipeline onto my github page. (If you look at some of my experiments on github, you’ll see the same card a number of times with 1…2…3…4 versions).

Maybe it’s possible to create a meta-automator that strings those four robots into 1. I’ll try that someday.
[pause]
Ok, so of course, I tried stringing them just now. And it didn’t work. So I put that automator into the trash –
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and now my original four robots give me errors, ‘the application …. can’t be opened. -1712’. I found the solution here (basically, go to spotlight, type in activity, then locate the application on the list and quit it).

Here are my automators:

Automator….

I think I love you.