Use IFTTT To Add Instagram, Faebook And Flickr Photos To Your Day One Journal

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Brett Terpstra's scripts will write your journal for you.
Brett Terpstra's scripts will write your journal for you.

With an update last week, iOS and Mac diary app Day One went from a tool for angst-mongering teens to full-fledged journal, adding support for photos (the original was pretty much text-only) and locations, and the ability to automatically pull in weather info.

But for serial hacker and tweaker Brett Terpstra, maker of the amazing Markdown preview app Marked, among many, many other things, this still wasn’t enough. So Brett wrote a tool called Slogger, which pulls in posts from your existing social networks and adds them to your Day One journal, rendering any text in Markdown, naturally.

Brett’s method involves using IFTTT (If This Then That), the web automation tool, along with Hazel on your Mac and a copy of Day One for OS X – you’ll need to be running the Mac version of the app even if you only want to use the iOS one.

Using these tools, Slogger (a combination of “social” and “logger.” picked to sound ugly and unsupported – which is is) will pull from your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr feeds, plus any RSS feed you like. As Brett’s post seems to be down right now, here’s the blurb pasted from my RSS reader:

Turns any image you can grab with IFTTT into a log entry using Hazel, Folder Actions or launchd (built in to Mac OS X).
Checks multiple Twitter Feeds for new, non-reply updates and favorites
This happens every 24 hours as a digest to avoid flooding your log (because we all talk too much)

If it finds recognized image links in these posts, they become their own post with image.

It will convert all links found in the text into Markdown, which displays quite nicely in Day One

It will check any number of RSS feeds for new posts, primarily intended to log your own posts on your blog or blogs you write for. If you can pull a feed of it, you can log it

The first image in the post will be added to the entry for that post

Entries are dates by their publish date, not the time the script runs

If you give it a Last.fm username, it will grab your playlist and loved tracks for the day

If you give it a Github Gist username, it will create links to any Gists you’ve posted for the day

Using IFTTT, you can grab Instagram, Flickr, Facebook and other images for adding. You can even have it add a picture when someone tags you in a Facebook photo. Assuming you don’t have a bunch of jackass friends who tag you in pictures that are completely unrelated to your life, that can be pretty cool.

If it sounds familiar, that’s because the excellent iPhone app Momento does something similar. However, Momento still hasn’t gotten an iPad version, and the iPad has been around for quite a while now.

Brett’s workaround isn’t just plug and play, though: you’ll need to get your hands dirty with some command line fu and some editing of Ruby scripts, but once that’s done the scripts run once a day and add the new stuff to your journal.

It’s exactly the kind of thing computers should do for us – why keep a separate diary when we’re already documenting our days all over the web anyway?

Source: Brett Terpstra

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