Last week, Josh discussed how we can use the ConvertFile function to convert files from their base format into HTML, in LDC #136. This week, we’re going to take that idea one step further, and create a script that can start and stop a background process that monitors a folder for files to convert. If it finds a file that hasn’t been converted, or has been modified since it was last converted, the background process will convert the file into HTML for us automatically. This creates a “hot” folder effectively, that’s monitored for jobs to do.

Whenever a task has to be done repeatedly and there’s not much thought that needs to go into running the task, it’s generally a great candidate for automating using a Legato script. I’ve been asked a few times in the past month or so how to quickly and easily insert multiple images into an HTML file. Since that’s a relatively easy task that just requires a lot of the same operation over and over again, I thought it would make a great example of automation for our Legato blog. So this week, we’ll take a look at a simple script that takes a folder as an input, scans it for images, and then inserts all of the images it finds into an HTML file.