Earlier, I discussed how to control your torrents from a remote machine using Transmission, but for simply adding new torrents to Transmission, it turns out there’s an even simpler solution, using, yet again, Dropbox.  (I swear, they aren’t paying me!  I just really love this app!)

# 1.  Create a “watch folder” for new Torrents in Dropbox.

First create a folder where you’ll download new torrents you want added to your home server running Transmission.  I called mine, um, Torrents.

# 2. Setup Transmission to monitor your folder.

Open up Transmission and go to Preferences and select Transfers.  First, you want to make sure torrents are automatically added by checking “Start transfers when added” and either un-checking the “Display ‘adding transfer’ options window” or “Only when there are multiple files”, depending on if you still want this window to open up when you add files normally.

Now check the “Auto add” button and select the folder you created above.

As a side note, you should also ensure that the folder you are downloading these files *to* is outside of your Dropbox if you plan on downloading large files too big for your account.

# 3. Download a torrent to folder.

Download your (totally legitimage and wholly legal) torrent file to the Torrents folder of your Dropbox on another computer.

Voila!  Your torrent should now be downloading and ready for your enjoyment once you get home.  If you’re interested in checking on it’s progress while you’re away, check out my earlier post detailing that.

# 4. What if I already have Transmission monitoring a different folder?

So, I actually already have Transmission watching my Downloads folder so that things downloaded in a web browser automatically open as well.  Unfortunately Transmission only allows you to watch one folder at a time.  To get around this, I used the same trick I did in my iTunes/Dropbox watched folder tip.  I set up a launch daemon to watch my Torrents folder inside Dropbox and move any torrent files to the Downloads folder, where they’ll be picked up by Transmission.  You can download the script I made here.

If you read my last two tips, on accessing 1Password and Transmission remotely, you’d know that I’m a big fan of SSBs, Site-Specific Browsers.

In those tips I mentioned using Prism on Windows, which works fine, but today I discovered that my favorite Windows browser, Chrome, actually supports SSBs out of the box, and because it uses the Webkit engine, in my opinion, it looks a bit nicer.  In particular, 1Password seemed to have issues with the numbers in the table on the left lining up properly, but renders just fine with Chrome.

And if you already have Chrome installed, why not, right?

And with Chrome it’s reeeeeeeeeeellllly easy.  Just navigate to the page you want to make an SSB out of and click the little page icon in the upper-right-hand corner.  You’ll see “Create application shortcuts…”:

Click that and you’ll get a pop-up:

And you’re done!