Tinderbox to Day One

I use both Day One and Tinderbox for journaling.

Day One is nice when I’m out and about and want to include photos and location information. The Day One mobile app is great.

Creating a Day One entry would go something like…

Snap a photo, then type…

“Had dinner at Amore and ordered this delicious lasagna”

This would create an entry with the photo, put a pin on the map, and record the weather. For logging travel, events, food, and people, Day One is great.

I use Tinderbox for all other entries. It’s my “Daybook”. Tinderbox lends itself to data analysis and text processing, so I put as much in there as possible.

An example Tinderbox entry might be…

Ordered replacement filter for CPAP

Boring, but useful. There’s no need for location information or a photo. I just want to record it so I can find it later.

I used to import all of my Day One entries into my Daybook but found the process a bit clumsy and error-prone.

What I’m finding more useful is copying specific entries from the Tinderbox Daybook into Day One, rather than the other way around. This is easily done using a Stamp in Tinderbox and the dayone CLI. Tinderbox “Stamps” are simply a convenient way of setting attributes or running scripts on a note or collection of Tinderbox notes.

Here’s the Stamp I’m using…

1

runCommand("/usr/local/bin/dayone -d="+$StartDate.format("y-M0-D")+" new", $Name+"\r\r"+$Text)

This Stamp calls runCommand, which allows Tinderbox to pass things to the shell. In this case, it’s calling the dayone command-line utility using the selected note’s date, title, and text as input. I just select a note, apply the Stamp, and Poof! a new entry appears in Day One.