Saving links to Tot
July 20, 2025 at 11:03 AM by Dr. Drang
I mentioned on Mastodon how much I enjoyed Myke Hurley’s interview of John Gruber on the most recent episode of Cortex. One part that particularly resonated with me was when Gruber spoke of all the online bookmark managers he’s used over the years and how none of them have stuck. It was like I was listening to myself. So when he said he’s shifted to using a Shortcut that saves the page he’s looking at to a list in Tot, I figured I’d give it a try.
I wrote some Tot Shortcuts last year: one for dictating short notes that includes the date, time and location; and another for cleaning up my shopping lists after a trip to the store. I still use them, and I still like Tot in general as a place to put ephemeral notes. I used Drafts for many years, but never cleared out the old notes; Tot’s seven-note limit forces me to keep temporary text temporary.
I keep the links in the 6th dot. Here’s what it looks like on the Mac:
For each link, it saves the date, title, and URL on successive lines. Blank lines separate the entries. It sounds as if Gruber’s system is more sophisticated, with an automation that runs every night to (I think) add a date header that applies to all the links saved on that day. That would make the list more compact, but I’m not going to take that step until I know I’ll actually keep using this system.
What is the system? It’s just this Shortcut, which you can make for yourself or download:
| Step | Action | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| 0 |  |
Share Sheet input of web page |
| 1 |  |
Get name of page |
| 2 |  |
Get URL of page |
| 3 |  |
Get today’s date |
| 4 |  |
Construct the text |
| 5 |  |
Add the text to the end of Tot dot 6 |
Not much to it, which is why I don’t feel bad about building it, even though my track record for saving links is pretty poor. My goal is to use this only for links to pages I intend to write about and to clear them when the post is written. Tot will help with that by getting crowded quickly.
To make it easy to use this Shortcut, I’ve added it to my favorites. It appears just below in that section of the Share Sheet on both my iPhone and iPad.
Running a Shortcut from the Mac Share Sheet takes more clicking than I’d like, so if I use this enough to get frustrated by the extra work, I’ll probably make a Keyboard Maestro macro that does the same thing.