I was looking at GTD applications again and wanting to automate the workflow for shipping BookMooch books. You get the title of the book and the address to mail it to in a formatted email. I use Bento to print out the invoice. The only fields that need to be populated are the address and the Book title, the rest is formatted already. But I also need to port the address over to Encidia as well to print the postage. I have played once with Apple’s Automator, but I am always wanting to do more than I know how to do with it.
- Get the book title out of the email.
- Get the the postal address out of the email.
- Enter the book title into Bento database
- Enter the address into Bento database
- Print the book packing slip from the Bento database.
- Import the address over to Endicia and print the postage.
- Back to the email and click on the “Respond to Request” link and open Firefox at the linked page. There I could respond accept and put in the date, or list it as sent.
As you can see this is a complicated system process, but I’ve tried to simplify it to get to where it is at, but I would love to automate it so I couldn’t have to do so much manual copy and pasting.
