journaling

Features, ideas, and thinking on Notanda

Wiki linking functionality, but sans CamelCase. Bracket-linking only. (See CamelVsNonCamel.) It has been pointed out that not using CamelCase breaks AccidentalLinking unless it is compensated for it in some other non-manual way… but perhaps this is not as important as it has been made out to be.

VoodooPad does its thing by checking for patterns on every word — I wonder if this is feasible due to the naturally limited nature of a personal desktop wiki. Would the server overhead be too much? See also FreeLink and GaGaParser. (Something I saw mentioned was to only check words four characters and longer.)

To forestall this I went with manually bracketing the desired wikiwords. This requires some memory of what articles have been already saved, but a quick CLI search can remind you. Oddly, I’ve found this promotes the creation of new articles, as I can quickly create a foobar.txt draft file on the fly for later writing.

RSS and Atom feeds are now available. They are hard files created via a cron-called script.

Journaling (aka blogging) could be is achieved by YYYY_MM_DD entries (e.g. 2005_07_27). Organized naturally with 2005_07 and 2005 pages. Still haven’t programmed this, and I’m not sure if I will or not. I had been uncertain whether to go through the effort, but it wound up not being a problem. Eventually I will want to compensate for the number of day articles listed in the 0-9 section of the automated Index, probably by splitting them off into their own archives and leaving the year pages.

I’ve added in tagging capabilities, self-organizing the site a la Flickr and del.icio.us. Tags are added on the last line of the original plaintext file with a simple punctuation indicator. And leveraging the tag concept further, I created a sidebar section that allows you to search by that article’s name as a keyword/tag on Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, and Google.

Bookmarks module Associating articles with tags (i.e. the article titles themselves are potential tags), so that if you’re viewing my page on baseball, a sidebar would display any bookmarks list of “Related Articles” with that article’s title as a tag is displayed at the end.

Other wikiesque functionality to be potentially added later: RecentChanges, FindPage, BackLinks (in addition to the current tagging), LastEdited, PageInfo.

Blogging functionality: of the standard blog features, the only one I’m really missing and would be interested in doing at this point would be comments, with some anti-spam capability.

I should mention that a lot of this has been inspired by Rui Carmo and the Tao of Mac site.

UPDATE - see article “Journler 2.0.2”.

Journler is a handy journaling program that is both free (donate if you’d like) and featureful, a combination that has been missing since MacJournal went commercial.

The UI does a pretty good job of not getting in your way and is grasped with a few moments of clicking around. I also appreciate the ability to record voice notes or embed iTunes tracks. While this might seem superfluous, I can see there might be times when words alone won’t do. You can also link to iPhotos, movies, Address Book cards, and arbitrary files in the Finder.

You can hook up to Blogger and LiveJournal, using it for blogging Out There as well as journaling In Here. Or email your entries to your admiring public.

If you’d rather not be famous (or infamous) because of your journal, there is a simple password protection preference — as the app points out, however, it does not encrypt anything, though this is planned for a future release.

Journler is at version 1.0.1 as of this writing, just made available. It is definitely worth a look, especially if you’re like me and miss MacJournal.