The first step is to organize your friends into several groups based on how well you know them. To do this open the friends tab.

Next click the “Make a New List” button which will let you give the list a name and then add your friends to it. You can see that I’ve made a few lists. My “Casual Friends” are acquaintances that I may have met but don’t know very well, or perhaps online friends. Basically friends that I’m not sure I want to share every single personal detail with. All nice people I’m sure, but still. Next I have a list called “Do I Know You?”. Sometimes I get friend requests from people that I think I may know but I’m not certain. Also, there are friends that I only know from certain Facebook games like Mob Wars. “Do I Know You” is for these people and I want personal information limited a bit further for this group.

Now that we’ve organized our friends into these lists, open the Privacy Settings under the Settings tab.

Clicking Privacy settings will open a page that contains the following:

Click the Profile link and you’ll be greeted with a page that lets you control how your Basic information is presented on Facebook. Basic information includes your Profile, Basic Info, Personal Info, Status Updates, Photos Tagged of You, Videos Tagged of You, Friends, Wall Posts, Education Info, and Work Info. The little “?” next to each item explains exactly what each items contains.

Click one of the popup menus next to an item and select “Customize…” and a dialog box will appear.

In this box I allow only my friends to view this information, and in the box below “Except These People”, I’ve excluded the people in the list “Do I Know You”. You could exclude people individually, but that would be pretty tedious. That’s what the friend lists are for. When I accept a new Facebook friend, I also add them to the appropriate friend list and these personal info settings are automatically applied. You can also have multiple lists and/or people excluded for each item.

Once you have all of your Basic settings how you like them, you can then navigate to your Contact Information.

Personally I feel that the items in Contact Information are the most personal and I tend to be more restrictive with who I share this information with. The items that can be configured here are: IM Screen Name, Mobile Phone, Other Phone, Current Address, Website, and email.

Lastly, you have to make certain that as you add new friends, that they get added to the appropriate list. If you don’t add them to one of your lists, then they will be able to see all of the information that you allow friends to see. This is easy enough to do. When you add or accept a friend, you are given the opportunity to add that person to one of your friend lists as illustrated to the left.

I hope this post has been of some use. If there’s anything I’ve forgotten or if you have tips you’d like to share, please do in the comments.

I ran across a post on Daring Fireball today which described using a perl script along with ThisService to search Google for selected text and replace that text with a link to first result returned by Google. Very handy, but I wanted to achieve the same functionality using Proxi.

Proxi supports shell script execution, but only as extra values (for now) so that makes it a little trickier. If you don’t care how much trickier, you can skip the rest of this and simply grab the blueprint.

We have to first break down the blueprint into several stages:

• Put the selected text on the clipboard.
• Construct a script using the text we’ve selected. Display the query.
• Execute the script, place the results in the clipboard, paste and display the results.

More specifically:

Stage 0 – A Control-Shift-L Hotkey Monitor trigger starts the ball rolling. It executes two tasks, a Command-C Key Press to initiate a copy, then an AppleScript which waits a short while to allow the clipboard to export after which it asks Proxi to handle an AppleScript trigger named “query stage 1″.

Stage 1 – Is an AppleScript trigger continues the process. This trigger will fire when Proxi is triggered via AppleScript with the correct name. In this case the name it’s looking for is “query stage 1″. The trigger places the contents of the clipboard into a value named “Clipboard” and executes a Screen Message task to display the search term. Next it write our a perl script using the clipboard contents and the Write to File task. Finally, it kicks off the last stage with another AppleScript task named “query stage 2″.

Stage 2 – An AppleScript trigger which matches “query stage 2″. When fired, it executes the perl script we made in Stage 1 and places the results in an extra value named “ScriptResults”. ScriptResults is displayed in a Screen Message task and loaded onto the clipboard using a Load Clipboard task. Finally, Command-V (paste) is simulated to insert the results in place of the selected text.

This is a great little exercise to demonstrate how to construct complex triggers using Proxi. It also demonstrates some of the shortcomings of Proxi that I’d like to address in future revisions. The ability to execute a script as a task and also modify values during task execution would eliminate the need to break this down into three separate triggers. In the meantime, I hope this helped.

The Proxi wiki has a download link as well as additional information on the Insert Link Blueprint.