Private Blogging (a.k.a. Journaling)

Yours truly wanted to return to blogging from this brand new home in a proper fashion… Nothing too fancy, but perhaps with a post introducing one or two of the really big things/changes (for the very best), that we have been dealing with recently.

The truth is that for the last six months I have continuously been coming up with all kinds of ideas, new experiences I felt like sharing, great anecdotes, etc. that I would have loved to write about.

For the most part I never did.

One of the reasons behind this ‘block’ was that I truly had a lot in my plate. Another big reason was/is this ‘grand opening’ sort of block outlined above.

Anyways, they say that excuses are for losers… So, as in many other situations, the way to go is just start, and deal with everything else later…

This is not to say I didn’t write at all. I have been keeping a ‘DayBook’.

The good thing about blogging in my case has been that it got me both into the habit of writing as well as into thinking about writing. In this sense I fulfilled one of the most important purposes I set for myself when I started this blog time ago.

So one day, when the writing urge was itching a bit more than usual… I quickly fired up Tinderbox, created a container which I named, you guessed it, ‘DayBook’… and set up the following ‘OnAdd’ action so that it would take care of naming every new note with the timestamp of when it was created.

Name=^Get(Created,"d/m/y - h:mm:s")

In other apps I use for similar purposes, such as VoodooPad, I have a similar setup. In this case the app. is even capable of fetching the location (time zone info) from the system so that, not only you have a nice first line showing you when you wrote wahtever, but also a hint on your physical whereabouts at the time.

In VoodooPad’s case, what you need to do is create within your document a new note called: ‘NewPageTemplate’. The contents of this template in my case are just:

$title$, $date$

This will also get you the title of the page you create within the first line of it. So for example the very first line of the VoodooPad page I’m looking at right now reads:

BestMartiniPlaces, Thursday 31 de May de 2007 07H55'04" America/Chicago

This is all too easy… and this is not to say that this info most probably already lies within the file… I know the date/time for sure does with regard to Tinderbox…

Your mind might or might not work this way… but I find this ‘metadata’ convenient as well as useful.

Great being back. Fond regards, TFS