07:20 AM
I think one of the tips I can pass on for my recent daily journal success is automate the process where possible. For starters, I use TextExpander (Smile Software) and Ulysses (Ulysses GmbH & Co.). TextExpander does what it says on the tin: It takes text inputs and expands them into formatted longer form text blocks. Ulysses is where I do my writing. It’s a Markdown text editor that I have configured to post to this site.
When I start a new post, I need to create three lines immediately: file name, the <H1> title for the post, and the <H2> time stamp. TextExpander. Let’s me take this: +nje
And expand it to this:
@ 20201223
#
## 07:20 AM
Moreover, the date and time stamps are actually inputs from these abbreviations: ddate and ttime
Writing in Ulysses was a choice that came with several considerations. First, I needed an editor that based its documents in Markdown. Markdown is a simple language for marking up text that stores in a simple text file format. I can then export to any proprietary document file type and display fully formatted text. This makes writing more fluid for me and portable should Ulysses disappear someday. It also supports export tools for posting to a number of blog platforms. And it doesn’t lock me into a canonical library format. It actually creates folders and arranges entries as discrete files on my laptop’s file system. What I see in the library view in Ulysses is what I see on my file system.
That’s a bunch of thinking I do not need to give to some basic repetitive tasks. These small automations are just the first I’ll come up with to make posting easier for me. I want to focus on content, not the tools to post the content.
10:44 PM
Been thinking about posting some older images from the past few years. I don’t want to deep dive or pad out the site with a bunch of stuff. I do, however, have work that I am proud of that I think is worth sharing. The max I will let myself go back is five years. Honestly, I don’t have much output in that window, but it will serve.
It will also give me an opportunity to suss out those other automations I spoke of earlier today.
