I’ve been struggling with finding a way to keep a journal of all my projects since I gave-up Evernote. My latest experiment, “ Jed ” has been fun to write and use but due to some flakiness of the Pinebook Pro USB ports, I’ve lost a lot of data using it.
This morning I was thinking about another project and remembered that I could look-up some of the obscure details about one of the components on this blog, because I made a post about it while I was working on it*. It then occurred to me that maybe Preposter.us could be my journal?
It meets a lot of the criteria. It’s pervasive in that I can access it from anything that has an email client (including a web browser), it’s durable, it’s convenient (all you do is open an email and start typing), so why not?
I guess the main downside is that it’s not private, and believe it or not, there are a few notes I don’t share immediately. So for these things, I’ll have to use something else.
Another downside is that journal entries tend to be pretty raw. I don’t like to interrupt the work at hand thinking about what I’m writing and as a result they are a little less polished than a typical post here. OTOH I’ve been trying to post more, and part of what’s held me back is feeling like posts I write need more work. So maybe this would be a way to solve both the documentation and the publishing problem in one stroke?
Finally I’d like a way to view journal entries chronologically without other posts interspersed between them. It would also probably be nice to filter-out the less-refined journal entries when browsing the blog for more finished work. One solution for this would be to implement a tagging feature in Preposter.us. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time anyway, and if not having it is actively causing me a headache, I’m more likely to get around to writing it.
So I’m going to give this a try. I’ll tag these posts with a journal “hashtag” and when I get around to writing support for tags into Preposter.us, there will be a way to click the tag and see all entries in the journal. I should also find a way to finally implement search, because I know I’m going to want to search journal entries for obscure terms and commands I used that I no longer remember.
* after writing this I went looking for this post to link to it and realized that it was one of the posts I never published because I didn’t think it was “finished” enough. Message received!
#journal