Sadly, just a few months after I discovered OhLife, a nice, but simple, daily journal webapp, they’ve shutdown. :( I was kind of skeptical when originally signing up given their apparent lack of a paid plan, and the real lack of monetization of this kind of service in the first place, besides simply charging upfront.
The service was great as it simply emailed you every day at a specified time, then you could reply to that email with some tidbits about the day which was recorded on their end as a sort of journal entry for that day. I loved it because my memory has been completely ruined by some recent events, so this allowed me to:
- Be reminded every day to actually write stuff down,
- And actually remember, or rather recall whatever happened in the last day/week/month.
Seeing as I just got finished getting Gitit working exactly how I wanted it, and was already using it as my blog platform as well as wiki, I decided to see about using it as my journal as well. So far I’ve cooked up the script at the bottom of the post to somewhat replicate OhLife’s functionality.
It creates a file with today’s date containing the proper metadata in my Gitit folder, commits it so that I can edit it from the Gitit webui, and finally uses a Pushover.net API wrapper script to push a notification to my phone, so I remember to actually write the entry. Today I also found a nice simple text editor for Android called Plain.txt that syncs with Dropbox, so I’ve integrated it into this neat ecosystem, and have a Dropbox daemon running on the same server Gitit is running on, syncing the journal folder, so I’m also able to edit the entries on the go!
#!/bin/bash
##Script to replace ohlife.com functionality as a daily journal...
todayfile=$(date -I).page
cd ~/wiki/wikidata/journal
touch ./$todayfile
printf -- "---\ntitle: Journal for $(date -I)\ncategories:journal\n..." > ./$todayfile
cd ../
git add ./journal/$todayfile
git commit -m "added $(date -I)'s journal entry"
##Then email and push it so I remember to write it!
echo "https://wiki.es.gy/journal/$todayfile"| mail -s "Journal entry for $(date -I)" aq@es.gy
/bin/pu.sh -t "Journal entry for $(date -I)" -u "https://wiki.es.gy/journal/$todayfile" "Journal entry for $(date
-I)"