SearchLink removes the drudgery from making web links

My classic movie podcast, Lions, Towers & Shields over at The Incomparable, uses a standard show-notes format. On each episode, we talk about one old movie, and I always link to places where you can stream it, buy physical media, and learn more about the film we’re watching. Even after I came up with a standard Markdown template I liked, I found myself doing a whole lot of tinkering, mostly Web searches, for each episode’s notes. So I decided to automate the process. I now have a macOS workflow that saves me lots of time.

I initially dropped my Markdown template for the show notes into a TextExpander snippet with a fill-in field for the movie title. I put in placeholders for all my links and their labels. I’d expand the snippet into a Drafts note, launch a browser, and open a folder full of the bookmarks I needed to perform my searches – IMDB, YouTube, Amazon, the past LTS catalog.…