Gordon Meyer, author of the O’Reilly book Smart Home Hacks, offers this tip, based on his experience posting Amazon links on his blog:
Here’s a great tip for bloggers and the like. I use TextExpander to create a handy macro for creating Amazon Affiliate links. It’s much easier than using Amazon’s web interface.
First, create a TextExpander snippet that looks like this:
Note that uses the nifty “%clipboard” feature, which will be replaced by the current clipboard contents when it is activated. The rest of the URL can be determined by using Amazon’s “create a product link” in their Affiliate Center. (And that’s the last time you’ll ever need to use it!)
When you’re ready to create a link to an Amazon product:
1. Simply find the product you want to link to on Amazon, then copy the ISBN or ASIN to your clipboard:
2. Then I type my trigger, and link is constructed that includes my Affiliate ID:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0001ES9G2/gordonmeyer08-20
That’s it, you’re done!
I’m sure there are lots of TextExpander users (myself included) who could take advantage of the %clipboard feature to reduce the time and keystrokes spent on monotonous tasks like this one.
[...] The makers of TextExpander, a very clever time- and finger-saving snippet utility, have posted a nice tip on the company’s blog. [...]
[...] 43f Links for Thursday, March 8th SmileOnMyMac Blog » Blog Archive » TextExpander: Simplify Tasks With %Clipboard Excellent tip from Gordon Meyer on using the “%clipboard” variable in TE snippets. [via:Hackszine] (tagged: tips osx mac textexpander) [...]
[...] I recently discovered a great application that is saving me a ton of time. This is called TextExpander, from SmileOnMyMac. [...]
[...] You can also do some neat things with stuff you copied to your clipboard. [...]
That’s hawt! – I was completely unaware of this. Great tip.
[...] Along with Quicksilver, TextExpander is one of my must-have Mac utilities. TextExpander is a “snippet” utility that will automatically paste in content based on user defined abbreviations. For instance, I have “bc” set to expand to “because.” However, the pasted text can be much longer (e.g. “sig” becomes a several line email signature). Today on the SmileOnMyMac Blog, I ran across a great tip I hadn’t previously know about TextExpander (RTFM), viz. that you can use “%clipboard” as a variable in your snippets. When the snippet expands the clipboard content is automatically placed wherever “%clipboard” appears. The original tip involved using this to create Amazon.com links, but it quickly occurred to me that I could use this to easily create hyperlinks when for posting on blog comments (not TUAW) or on forums. [...]
[...] Gordon is also the contributor of one of our most popular TextExpander tips, on using the clipboard built-in macro. [...]