Using Draftoton to automatically post a quote every day

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Good morning,

I’m loving Drafts and the potential that it gives you.

I’m currently using Draftoton by @FlohGro which is an excellent set of actions to post to Mastodon and wondering if it’s possible to automate posting a quote once a day.

I currently have a draft of “Quotes to use” that I want to post set out as follows. I just add new quotes to the top / bottom of the draft:

Sometimes, the nicest people you meet are covered in Tattoos and sometimes the most judgmental people you meet go to Church on Sundays.
Unknown

If we can alleviate someone’s fear, that is the greatest gift we can offer them. 
Thich Nhat Hanh

Go out of your way to help people. Few things in life are as satisfying. Be nice to strangers. Be nice even when it doesn’t matter. 
Sam Altman

What people remember most is someone who helped them in hard times. 
Brian Norgard

What would be great is to be able to take the top (or bottom) quote and then automatically post it via Draftoton to publish the following:

What people remember most is someone who helped them in hard times.
Brian Norgard

#MorningQuote

The toot can be at the same time each morning.

I would then ideally like to move the quote just posted from the “Quotes to use” draft to a “Quotes used” draft so that I have a record of the quotes posted with the date.

Eg.

19/02/23: Sometimes, the nicest people you meet are covered in Tattoos and sometimes the most judgmental people you meet go to Church on Sundays.
Unknown

18/02/23: Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.
John Lennon

Is this something that’s possible? Thank you. :+1:

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You could certainly write an action to do this, however automating it to work every day at a certain time is the problem. Drafts itself has no automation like that, meaning you can only run actions directly yourself, not every day at a certain time.

You could write a Shortcuts automation to do this, but I’m pretty sure you’d have to leave whatever device you used to do this unlocked, and the run action command in Shortcuts has to open the Drafts app itself to run.

If I were trying to do this, I’d probably try to do it entirely through Shortcuts itself and set that to run at a specific time every day. the built in Drafts actions I think would be enough to update the two Drafts you need, and although I haven’t done the research, I’m sure there’s a way to post to Mastodon through Shortcuts. No, this doesn’t use Draftadon, bu it would at least let you keep maintaining the quotes files in Drafts.

Obviously, I’m not the developer of either Drafts or Draftadon, so your milage may vary, :relaxed:.

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I think you’ll have the same troubles using shortcuts exclusively vs using Drsftodon + a shortcut.
It would still not run consistently.

I will look into it. What I’ll try to do:

  • use the schedule action and a fixed time.
  • when running the action it will pick the first / last quote and schedule it for the next morning

You would only need to run this action once a day (which could be further „automated“ by using a reminder that contains a url to run that action…

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Thanks very much for looking into this. :+1:t4:

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I finally took some time over the weekend to implement an Action that hopefully solves your request.
Can you please try this action:

You need to edit the script step in it to insert the uuids of your „Quotes To Use“ and „Used Quotes“ draft. You will find a few lines that explain that in comments above the variables.
Let me know if you need further assistance and if that works for you

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Thank you for looking at this. I’ll have a play around with it now!

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