A couple of points:

• When I mention 'archive' in the title, I mean the Gmail 'Archive' feature - ie, remove the message from the inbox but keep it in 'All Mail'.
• You need to have IMAP enabled on your Gmail account.
• Don't let that '\\Deleted' stuff scare you - in Gmail's IMAP implementation, that removes the message from the inbox, but it doesn't actually delete it.

(... he said, ignoring the fact that he hadn't posted anything here in the past seven months.)

All of these services have a very similar feature set:

• A means to post a short entry, usually a textarea and a button
• A means to reply to an entry, again just a textarea and a button
• A list of entries and replies
• A means to "follow" other users, eg subscribe to their entries

I think that about covers the basics. Now, if you look around at Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, Rejaw etc, you might wonder why the textarea, button, and list provided by any one of these services is any more compelling than the same features on the other services. The answer is - it isn't.

Ping.FM addresses the box+button aspect of this by allowing you to update all of your services from a single location, and you can use RSS to aggregate timelines from the services in a single location, but you still need to jump around from one service to another to properly manage replies and subscriptions.

So - to the point... all of you microstatusblogamathings need to get together and come up with a way to do the following:

• Use some other service as a source for updates, and allow your service to be used in the same way. The textarea+button on your site is no better than the one on the other guy's site, so why should I be forced to use yours? Having my content on your site is what should matter to you - it shouldn't matter how it gets there. If you come up with some awesomely compelling feature that makes your textarea better than the others, fine... but have some basic standard that all of you guys can use to work together.
• Follow and reply to others, regardless of the service they choose as their "home" service, for the same reasons. Having this cross-site conversation visible on your site makes your site better, and it makes my life easier.

Now, do I think any of this will actually happen? Of course not. People have been making the same argument for interoperability in the context of instant messaging services for over a decade, and it still hasn't happened. But these new services are being built by a new generation of developers, so maybe they're a bit more open to this sort of suggestion than the giant corporations who control the IM services. Maybe it could happen.

Installation of Scrawl was straightforward, and after creating a few test entries with it, I was ready to migrate my news items over to Scrawl's "blog entry" content type. This was pretty easy, since Scrawl simply repurposes the News Item content type. First, I re-named the folder that contained my existing news items. Then, I created a new folder with the same ID as the old folder. Finally, I ran the following script (from my custom skin folder) to create Blog Entries with the same content and ID's as my old News Items:

from Products.CMFCore.utils import getToolByName

# get the catalog & workflow tools
pc = getToolByName(context, "portal_catalog")
wf = getToolByName(context, "portal_workflow")

# folder where the new Scrawl items will go
# change this for your own needs
nblog = context.nowhere.archive

# get News Items and create Blog Entries
entries = [e.getObject() for e in
            pc.searchResults(portal_type="News Item")]
for e in entries:

    # get info from the old object
    nid = e.id
    nkws = e.Subject()
    cdate = e.CreationDate()
    edate = e.getEffectiveDate()
    mdate = e.ModificationDate()
    ntitle = e.Title()
    ndescr = e.Description()
    ntext =  e.getText()
    ntype = e.Schema()['text'].getContentType(e)

    # create the new object
    nblog.invokeFactory(type_name = "Blog Entry", id=nid)
    item = nblog[nid]
    item.editMetadata(subject=nkws)
    item.setFormat(ntype)
    item.update(title=ntitle,
                text=ntext,
                description=ndescr,
                creation_date=cdate,
                effective_date=edate,
                )

    # my items are initially private, so two steps to publish
    wf.doActionFor(item, "show")
    wf.doActionFor(item, "publish")

    # set the dates on the new object to match the old object
    item.setCreationDate(cdate)
    item.setEffectiveDate(edate)
    item.setModificationDate(mdate)
    item.indexObject()
    print "created "+ nid

return printed

After running that, I had published blog entries that were copies of my old new items, with the same id's and in the same location as the old items, completely migrated with old URLs intact.

Feel free to copy and modify that script for your own needs - it's a simple example of how to migrate one content type over to another.

Edit: It just occurred to me that my script up there does not migrate comments. I only had a couple of comments on my old entries, so it's not a big deal for me, but it might be for you.

Not too crazy about this NuPlone theme, but it'll have to do for now.. stay tuned :)

Anyway - the point: steady income => more money => shiny new iMac => I'm no longer using Epiphany as my main browser, so I needed to cook up a way to quickly close a bunch of tabs in Safari. Safari already has a way to close all tabs except the current tab, so we just need a way to close tabs to the left or to the right of the current tab. AppleScript to the rescue!

First, the left tabs:

tell application "Safari"
    set cWindow to first item of windows
    set ctIndex to index of current tab of cWindow
    repeat ctIndex - 1 times
            close first item of tabs of cWindow
    end repeat
end tell
open location "x-launchbar:hide"

Then, the right:

tell application "Safari"
    set cWindow to first item of windows
    set ctIndex to index of current tab of cWindow
    repeat while (count of tabs of cWindow) > ctIndex
            close last item of tabs of cWindow
    end repeat
end tell
open location "x-launchbar:hide"

I save those as "Close Left Tabs" and "Close Right Tabs" in ~/Library/Scripts. When I need to use them, I just bang a couple of keys to bring up the very-excellent LaunchBar [1], then 'CL' or 'CR' to run whichever one I need.

So, this is great for me and Safari, but it doesn't bode well for the similar work I did for Epiphany. There's a problem with that one, I think related to the disconnecting of GTK signals. The symptom is that if you're using that extension, Epiphany won't cleanly exit after you've closed all of its windows. And the real problem is that since I'm not in GNOME most of the time these days, I'm really not feeling an urgent need to fix it, which sort of sucks if you happen to be using this extension with Epiphany.

So, if you're one of those two people... feel free to hack on it ;)