Interesting to see how people are using Org mode for journaling.
This is app uses text views to convert the text back to Org mode syntax: kind of a two way street implementation of having a UITextView with a controller which parses and creates rich-text ↔ plain-text.
I don’t usually link raw Zettelkasten notes, but I think this one is interesting, even if it’s just an outline.
One annoying thing that happened today’s “beautiful” web is that we forgot that we have this CSS selector.
a:visited
I was also sinful in this, since I just pushed a change which adds proper a:visited support to my site.
This is mostly annoying for me, since I see almost all links as visited, but can be helpful for readers.
Now you can see visited links in a different color than the default links.
Follow-up on Setting up Type as a quick capture interface for my TaskPaper journal:
After using this setup for a few days, I just removed my running lists. I still like the idea, but I’m heavily invested time in my TaskPaper journal now, and I’m in the habit of using it, too, so I’ll directly capture there as before.
Running lists isn’t my thing.
It is a simple app which let’s me append any text (with a timestamp) to plain-text files.
Basically a quick capture tool for running lists.
LaunchBar can be also used to append text to plain-text files.
I haven’t kept any running list before in plain text; I just captured these ideas into Things directly.
I created a couple of new files using Type in my ~/Documents/Running Lists folder. Here are some examples.
Brainstorm.txt
Following the Natural Planning Model in GTD, sometimes the best way to figure out something is to start writing about it.
Debug.txt
Stole this idea from the Type app website.
It should be a log of steps I used to figure something out while programming.
Since this is just a capture file, steps must be migrated into proper how-tos later.
Meeting.txt
A quick log of any meeting I’m attending to capture what we are talking about at the moment quickly.
Type is focused on just one task: append text to these files. It doesn’t disrupt my workflow.
But I still treat these files as an inbox in a sense, so after I capture anything here, it should be processed.
Instead of introducing yet another inbox, I integrated these files into an existing one.
I made a shortcut that is triggered via Keyboard Maestro when I’m reviewing my TaskPaper journal.
The shortcut grabs all running files and then lets me pick one.
It grabs the content from the picked one, then appends it to my TaskPaper journal as a new entry.
Finally, it cleans the picked running list file, so it’s ready for the next batch of ideas.
I remember when we had Adium and you could connect almost all of your chat services to one client.
Some features were missing, but the basic texting part usually worked.
We had a way to set our status to online, away, or offline. There was no need for Do Not Disturb or notification management since you just went offline and nobody could reach you.
Actually, you can still use Slack like this.
Some services even queued up your messages, so the next time you went online, new messages awaited you.
I could even set the currently played music as my status.
Almost all messaging app had some form of proper native Mac app.
Remember that Skype for Mac was actually a pretty decent Mac app with AppleScript support.
These days, it’s just an Electron app, although nobody uses Skype anymore…
My friends used MSN Messenger too, which was kind of a crappy client, but at least you could use it through Adium.
These days, I have to use Cardhop to have proper messaging integration in my contact list to have a central place to jump into the different clients.
Almost all clients are stupid Electron apps on the desktop.
Mobile clients are better: at least some of the biggest players have proper native apps on iOS.
Facebook Messenger for Mac is a React Native app, which is a bit better than Electron.
I can’t go offline anymore; instead, I have to manage my notifications and schedule them using Focus modes.
I kinda miss old IM apps.
Follow-up on Liked “MailMate”:
I just bought MailMate a couple of minutes ago. It turns out I love to use plain-text email for writing and reading. It’s just way easier to edit my emails in MacVim than to fuck around with the Mail.app compose window.
The Things integration is also pretty cool. I can get the complete plain-text email in the to-do note, which is way more excellent than the jumbled text-fest I had previously parsed by the Things mail service forwarded from Mail.
I’m still developing my workflow around the rule-based smart mailboxes, which are pretty powerful.
I’ll write more about this app in the future.
So, I should be able to move the MarsEdit micropost window around now and attach pictures to a post right there.
Play 2.0 just got released with a new channels feature.
It’s behind a subscription, but you can try it for seven days.
I started using Play as a replacement for YouTube’s Watch Later list (and for other sites too, like Vimeo).
YouTube is an attention magnet, and I want to avoid it when possible.
Using the Watch Later feature makes this more hard.
Play keeps me out of the YouTube app, mostly…
I also follow YouTube channels using RSS from Reeder instead of the YouTube app.
This way, I have an integrated workflow of browsing videos, blog posts, Mastodon posts, etc.
I’m also trying to give minimal data to Google through YouTube other than my watch history.
I have watch history turned off, but I’m sure Google still tracks it.
Because of this workflow, it seems redundant to use Play to subscribe to the same list of YouTube channels.
I added my list of channels to Play anyway to test the Channels feature.
It was a bit annoying since Play has no Shortcuts integration for managing channels or OPML import.
I don’t have a conclusion on the usefulness of this feature for me yet, but I’ll test it in the following week, and we will see if I keep the subscription or not.
I’m giving up the IndieWeb markup with bookmarks, since they kinda hard to get right.
All I want is a title and a blockquote, but with the IndieWeb markup I have to have a post content just to markup the link properly.
So, instead, I just add the “Bookmarked”, “Read”, “Liked”, etc. verbs to the title of the post and be done with it.
If someone has a better idea, let me know.
I’m messing with my bookmarks today.
I keep a lot of cool articles in DEVONthink as my central repository, but I also want to share some of these links here.
I’m testing a simple workflow for this using a DEVONthink smart group, which shows me all my bookmarks from my Decoding database that aren’t published yet.
I’m using DEVONthink custom metadata to mark a record “published”.
This workflow desperately needs automation, but I want to start as simple as possible and see how it works in practice.
I also want to check if webmentions are triggered via the WordPress API.
Update
They do!
I’m just testing if I can ping another post from MarsEdit using Webmentions.
This is the not-so-poor men’s version of backlinks.
Update: looks like it worked!
It is actually occured to me that I can get the current Safari selection in Shortcuts, convert it to Markdown from Rich Text, then Markdown to HTML, then I end up with a blockquote.
You need Drafts for the Markdown to HTML action.
Since all my respond type posts are created using one shortcut which decorates them with microformats, this makes me able to select text, and append it to the post.
On the long run, this will give me context on why I saved something to my bookmarks.
I think I’m going to start a new post series called interesting blogs.
I just want to save sites that I find on the web into a nice journal format.
It doesn’t necessary mean that I’ll subscribe to them using RSS, but can be a cool new tag in my bookmarks.
Should I publish longer articles as one big post, or break them up into 2-3 pieces?
I created a more advanced outline post format for my Bike based posts.
New entries will use a new bike-outline Stimulius controller which I originally created for my Zettelkasten, so I can have basic outline capabilities for Markdown lists.
It gets the post content and adds toggles to each outline row, so I can open and close them.
It also uses block IDs as row links, so each outline row can be linked independently.
I don’t use Bike outline IDs, but generate them on-the-fly using checksums instead.
This will change as I update the content, but it’s fine.
I’m just testing my blog post saving shortcut for my TaskPaper interstitial journal.
I’m creating more rows, just for testing.
This one is a child row of the previous one.
This one is a child row as well.
We’re getting this little fella in the weekend.
This thread is a good example for what we call interoperability.
I’m not sure what happened but I rarely listen to any podcast these days.
Sometimes I pick up an episode of something GTD or productivity-related when I’m doing chores around the house, but I stopped listening to the “6 hours-long episode of a couple of guys talking about Apple” style podcasts (except Mac Power Users).
Jason has concerns about the format of Apple Journal:
Like Apple Notes, the Journal app works without the Files app. Instead of your journal entries being discreet text files or similar that can be managed in the file system, they’re built into the app itself. It might work, like Apple Notes, using a SQLite database within the Journal app container.
I’m also moving into using more open formats for journaling, although I think there is a slight difference between a journal and a diary.
Both of these practices provide a clearer picture, bringing us closer to the state of the past than just a simple memory.
Our memories give a false image because we can only remember the good things. This distorts the past and overvalues things that were not as good as we remember.
We can’t trust our memories, but we can trust a diary/journal, since it acts as a bookmark to the past, showing what happened in our lives. It functions as a backward tickler file, bringing things from the past to us. This retrieved information helps us to better understand ourselves in the future. We can see the difference between the past and our current state clearly, which can provide a new perspective on how we handle a current situation.
In essence: both of these practices allow us to compare our present self with our past one and draw conclusions.
So back to Apple Journal…
The only thing I see myself using Apple Journal for is the missing “add a description to multiple photos” app for now.
Sometimes I want to have a short description of an event that is stored in Photos, and since both apps are from Apple, hopefully, the integration will be better than duplicating my photos into yet another app as attachments.
Otherwise, I don’t see myself migrating away from Everlog in the foreseeable future.
I mentioned that I want to find a use case for TaskPaper, because I adore the app. Turns out™ it’s actually pretty good at being a journal and an outliner app. I created a new file and started logging today’s stuff. This is what it looks like.
It is a mix between a capture tool, a journaling tool, and a temporary task management tool. Basically the digital replica of my Field Notes notebook.
I would love to use TaskPaper for something, but all my note-taking and task management needs are covered by other apps.
But I still love the idea and minimalistic UI of TaskPaper.
The first Apple event I haven’t watched live in 16 years was today’s one because you know… we were sleeping in Europe.
I don’t really care about the outline display now, because I exported it into Bike.
I can collapse, expand, and format it anyway I want.
Also, adding new rows/zettels is way easier this way, so I’ll create an export shortcut to Markdown and leave it like that for now.
Follow-up on 09:58.
Also, what if I migrate my outlining workflow to Bike and generate the outline from that file?
It is already an HTML structure and the workflow of linking zettels and inserting them into the outline is easier on my Mac than the iPad, because it has a bigger display.
This would mean that the outline can link to the actual file in The Archive locally, which can be replaced with a [[wikilink]] when generating the outline from the Bike HTML.
I can even do this using Shortcuts, there is no need for Ruby scripting.
Today’s project is to write a script which generates the Zettelkasten Outline page automatically, since I have zettel IDs present with the structure in note slugs.
I also want to make everything collapsed under level 3.
Previously
I created a shortcut which can export the current Bike selection to a new Markdown file in my Zettelkasten.
It doesn’t sync like my publish script does with WordPress, but it was easier to implement, since copy and paste between Drafts and Bike works pretty well.
The shortcut just cleans up the text and sets the title if it’s needed.
Otherwise it will create a headless zettel.
At the end it opens the note in The Archive app where I can edit it, or publish it using Git.
This shortcut actually uses the following apps.
Keyboard Maestro to copy and paste the text from Bike to Drafts.
Shortcuts to clean-up the Markdown output.
Then Drafts to create a new Markdown file in my Zettelkasten.
In the video Archive complains about the “writing test”.
It’s not related to the shortcut.
I’m spending my time today to integrate Micro.blog into my workflow.
I also used Micro.blog to reply Mastodon posts a couple of times before.
I follow people using RSS on Mastodon.
I don’t have a Mastodon account, and don’t plan to create one.
Replying to their posts from my RSS reader sucks, since I have to search for them on Micro.blog, type their username, find the post, then I can press the Reply button.
There should be a better way to find Mastodon posts on Micro.blog.
I created a shortcut which seems to work most of the time.