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Great Men Keep Journals

artofmanliness.com

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Re: Great Men Keep Journals

#51

Post by alanfalcon »

patrickgzill wrote: post #49
alanfalcon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phenomenal, simple idea. I, too, signed up. I can still dig up random LiveJournal entries that I wrote on a whim ten years ago. What would people here rate the chances of me being able to do the same with OhLife entries in ten years?

Don't you keep all emails you send in a "sent" folder?

Good point, and true enough. I should have signed up using my Google account (I should still sign up using my Google account).

I recently unearthed my AOL user database from the late 90s. Dropping it into a simple text editor, I get a ton of garbage characters but also every e-mail I ever sent or received on my AOL account for about five years (including almost all the Spam). While it was sometimes painful reading through that mess (for various reasons), I gained some interesting insight into my past that I found useful. What's interesting is that I have a great deal more mail saved up in my various e-mail boxes, but I wouldn't think to go through and read those chronologically as I did with the AOL mail.

Re: Great Men Keep Journals

#52

Post by [deleted] »

dabent wrote: post #5

I used to journal for years and stopped. Then I messed with OhLife (a YC startup) and kept going with it. I'm not connected with them other than being a user, but if you're online anyway, it's a pretty handy tool to keep a journal. http://ohlife.com/ It's also a good example of a clean design and user experience.

[deleted]

Re: Great Men Keep Journals

#53

Post by vimalg2 »

I found 750words.com useful to get me started on the Private Journalling habit. It also helps with brainstorming on the days when i feel like doing that.

The site uses game mechanics to keep you at it, until you no longer need the game mechanics - You just do it everyday without the reminder email or the Badges. They have a one-month challenge as well for those inclined for healthy competition.

750words.com/one_month/accept

Everybody 'wins' as long as they stick it out.

Re: Great Men Keep Journals

#54

Post by omouse »

sleight42 wrote: post #28
dabent wrote: post #5

I used to journal for years and stopped. Then I messed with OhLife (a YC startup) and kept going with it. I'm not connected with them other than being a user, but if you're online anyway, it's a pretty handy tool to keep a journal. http://ohlife.com/ It's also a good example of a clean design and user experience.

Interesting. Somewhat off-topic but what on earth is their business model? Journals are private. There are no advertisements. The service is free. YCombinator hopes to make money from this how? Don't get me wrong: it's a simple and clever idea. Just... it's not philanthropy, is it?

Some things don't need a business model. They should release the code as free/open source software if they haven't already.

Just think of it as a gift to the world and you can rest easy at night :D

Re: Great Men Keep Journals

#55

Post by omouse »

There was another trend back in the day, something like a bookmark/quotes book. You would write in this journal quotes and page numbers from books/poems that you liked so that you could refer to them later on. The nice thing is that by writing down the quote, you would also be more likely to remember it and the surrounding context. I read Byron's Don Juan and man, if I didn't write down a few quotes and page numbers I would have forgotten what happened in this epic story!

Re: Great Men Keep Journals

#56

Post by foxhop »

beza1e1 wrote: post #11

I just wrote myself a little script. Let's see, if it sticks ... $ cat bin/journal #!/bin/bash FILE=${HOME}/Dropbox/journal.txt echo >>${FILE} date >>${FILE} echo >>${FILE} vim + ${FILE}

I'm doing something similar. I found a cool vim command, ':r !date' for the current date. I'm using hg mercurial in addition to get additional backup security and logging. : P

I also decided host the repo at bitbucket. This will let me have 'offsite' backups and the ability to pull my journal whenever I have a computer and internet... which is always.

Re: Great Men Keep Journals

#57

Post by nlco »

Khroma wrote: post #23
jcw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using this zsh function for a year or two: jr () { echo "---" echo "\n##"`date +" %a %D %l:%M%P"` >> ~/journal.txt cat >> ~/journal.txt } It usually emits 72 dashes, so that I can stay within that margin (manually, heh). Edited to not break HN. The '##' is because I habitually markdown format everything.

That seems kind of unsafe to me, since it's all keeping it in one file.

How is it unsafe? (asking because I don't know, not to contradict)

Re: Great Men Keep Journals

#58

Post by kentosi »

Andrew_Quentin wrote: post #38

I have written a journal almost constantly since I was perhaps 15. I love it. I can express on it all of my emotions, but still secrets are kept. I can write on it all of my thoughts. It is, I must say, because of the journals I have kept that I have overcome so much adversity and it is journals which help me to push myslef further, and become better, every singl day. More often I do not know it, but the simple act o…

I'm sorry but could you please explain the difference between a diary and a journal? I just realised that I have no idea what the difference is ...

Re: Great Men Keep Journals

#60

Post by nitrogen »

nlco wrote: post #57
Khroma wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems kind of unsafe to me, since it's all keeping it in one file.

How is it unsafe? (asking because I don't know, not to contradict)

One accidental command and every entry is lost, not just one entry or the most recent. Adding a "git commit journal.txt; git push offsite master" or something similar to your journal script will alleviate that risk.

Edit: you also don't have file timestamps to show when an entry was actually written, in case that matters to you.

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