I finally consolidated all my Digital Journals
Day One had been the app where I started to journal digitally in. I don't recall when that had been, but my user id had been 510. I guess it must have been quite early on.
Since then things have changed..
I had the tendency to switch my preferred tools all the time already then and stopped using Day One when I switched to Android. And then started to use it again, when the app became available on Android later. More switches of phones and operating systems followed and with it my usage of the app went on and off.
Long story short, my Day One usage never had been consistent, but I updated it every now and then after all, and especially after it became available on the web. I had been using Linux already and having the app in a browser had been a very a convenient way to update the journal.
In the meanwhile I also kept a journal in Emacs, first with org-journal and then with Denote. At some point Obsidian came into the mix, and I even used a collection of plain-text files.
Yes, it's been a mess of journal-entries/files in different apps, formats, in various folders and to top things off: all with a different file-naming scheme.
Since I have now settled on a setup in Obsidian which works well for me, I started importing all the journal entries I did in Emacs and all similar files on my hard-drive. Since all those files are in plain-text anyway, it had been mostly a process of renaming them to my preferred naming convention and copy them into vault.
I did all the renaming with KRename by the way. It was fast, reliable and also provived a preview of the output, which had been very helpful.
Fun fact
In the process of importing files I just figured that the longest time I managed to stick to an OBTF had been three days shy of 3 three months. I am still tempted to give that a try again.
And while I was already at it, I finally took the time to import all the entries from the Day One journal as well.
This had been a little more involved as I had to convert the exported JSON file in one way. Luckily there had been a plugin which I used in a test vault to avoid messing things up. The plugin also took care of my custom file-naming, which had been helpful.
One on the things that I enjoyed in DAY ONE had been the "ON THIS DAY" feature, which always had been a source of inspiration and a fun look at things that happened at some point in the past.
In my daily note I have long since replicated this at first with a DATAVIEW query, and later by using the built-in BASES feature, to collect all the notes I did on this day.
Today I had been greeted with 13 entries on this day with the oldest from 2014!
Awesome! I am not sure what took me so long to finally consolidate them all.
Not only had this been fun to go through, but I also figured out that I today (by the time I started writing this), exactly four years ago, started one note in Obsidian and then finished it in Day One. Talking about a way to create a mess.
Anyway, with everything now nicely in one format and app, I will use the next few days to sort out some of the remaining posts in orgmode and all look for more "stray Markdown files" on my HD and then do the only wise thing and delete everything else that remains (including the Day One account), so I don't have to ever do this again.
I did mention that I am having a vacation, or?