We’ve been talking alot about journaling lately and the benefits that it can bring to your life, as well as the lives of your loved ones. But, what if you could turn your digital journaling into an awesome, automated digital tracking and logging system? Well, with a little geekery, the new Slogger 2, and Day One for the Mac, that automated digital logging system can be yours.
So, what the heck does this do?
You can go check out Brett Terpstra’s site (the creator of Slogger) if you want the in depth explanation, but Slogger is basically a command line utility that allows you pull all of your data from different social networks and services like Flickr, GoodReads, Instapaper, Pinboard, Twitter, etc. and have it easily and beautifully imported into your Day One journal. If that sounds too good to be true, then you are in for a great surprise. With just a little bit of setup and execution (you will have to get into the command line) you can make Slogger start slogging it’s way to logging all of the stuff that you do online and is important to you. Something else to mention is that Slogger 2 has a plugin architecture that allows developers to add their own type of automated logging to the Slogger system.
Setup
You need to be running a Mac with Day One installed on it. You can either be syncing your Day One journal with Dropbox or iCloud; Slogger 2 works with both. Next, go to the Slogger 2 github site and download the the archive and extract it. Once you have the files extracted to wherever you downloaded them, you can either keep them there or better, move them to your home directory in a folder called ‘slogger’. Next go through the README.md file that Mr. Terpstra provides. It will give you some detailed instructions on how to make this work. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here, just follow the steps inside of the README and you will be up and running in no time. After doing the minimal setup and running Slogger you can go to your Day One journal and take a look at your well-formatted publicy accessible data.
OK, so now what?
It’s never good to just “hack” something together for the sake of hacking it together. So, what does this necessarily give you that can benefit your journaling habit? Slogger 2 is a very useful and awesome tool, but will prove itself to be even more useful the longer that you use it. As time passes it will be nostalgic to look through all of your data and see how it changes through the months and years.
