Show HN: Littlelogs, a social journal of progress on your projects | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Littlelogs, a social journal of progress on your projects

littlelogs.co

43 pointsjoshsharp18 comments

Congratulations for launching! What is / will be the difference between Littlelogs and Twitter e.x.? What wil make it special? I currently cannot check it out myself, I'm on the waiting list and don't have access yet, but from what I see it looks like no character limit? Will there be an API to pull down the updates and include them somewhere else, like on the project homepage?

small bug report: I tried signing up with this description

    "im currently working on a self hosted CI server (leeroyCI) and a static site generated which will soon get a hosted web interface to make it comfortable."

And I got s 500 error page. Replacing the description with "-" worked and let me sign up.

Argh sorry. I've emailed you an invite instead.

I've been keeping journals for all my personal projects for quite some time now because I find it useful to "get context" when I go back to a particular project after some time. So something like this certainly piques my interest.

My journal is usually a journal.md at the root of the project, like so: [1]. It has a very simple format: datetime stamp, text. Sometimes I use bullets and indented text, but its usually prose or code.

Do you want to consider pulling journal updates directly from people's github as a feature? Of course, my kind of journal is a little too detailed - intended for me to pick up when I get back, but maybe a publicjournal.md which would be the author's ready-for-public-consumption version of the journal?

[1]https://github.com/vinodkd/halo/blob/master/journal.md

I've begun doing that too and second integration with git. I wonder though, why don't you embed your journal within the git log? Relevant commits of mine accompany a journal entry that goes after the empty line in the commit message, it makes for easy and contextual reading--these entries tend to be paragraph-sized though.

Two reasons: UX and intent

UX: My next comment usually involves looking at my previous ones and keeping that flow. sometimes my journal has todos that i'm tracking; things like that.So having it all in one place is useful and the git log experience breaks that into two pieces: one to view the log to date and another to add a new log entry.There's probably an opportunity for a shell script that loads up the log in an editor, allows me to add an entry, diffs it on exit and auto commits.

Sometimes i'll enter the same text in both my commit message and journal; and some other times my commit message essentially says "look at the journal, too detailed to list here".

Intent: Sometimes I use the journal to track not just what i am doing but also what I should be doing. Alternate paths I want to try, philosophical sidebars on why I'm doing what I'm doing, etc. These entries explain to my future self why the project is in the state that I come back to it :). I'm not sure how I could put that into anything other than prose - since its not fully fleshed out code yet. I've tried design docs and that works sometimes, but usually I just want to jot down my thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness mode rather than figure out the right document to put the thought in. The journal works best for this. Later, I'll pull things from the journal into a design doc.

Thanks, I love to read about other people's workflows, especially when it's about something I also do. Can I get in touch with you once I have that shell script? It's very relevant functionality for something I'm working on that works with git.

Sure. just followed you on github if that's sufficient. i'm not much of a social media person, so let me know if you want to connect via email.

btw, another project idea of mine is to create a stream-of-consciousness editor: you create the content (code, meta-information about the code, whatever) as it "comes to you" and then figure out a place for it later. this is obviously the opposite of how our current file-based editors work, but in its simplest form its not that different in its implementation (autosave untitled files and allow them to be renamed, for example). What would be really cool is to have chunks of content belong to multiple documents, or being able to copy-n-paste by linking and so forth. Again, nothing that hypertext itself isnt already, just a concrete implementation in an editor context.

one more for "when I get to it" :)

I had thought about something similar for prose--when I'm writing I often get sentences or even paragraphs in my head ahead of time, so I want to have some easy 'capture blobs and arrange later' editor interface at some point.

I can see your email from your commits on halo, if that's alright I can get in touch through that address once I'm ready to open source what I'm working on.

dont think that will work - that's an aspirational email address that i hope to setup one day (you see how far the rabbit hole of procrastination goes :)).

edit: followed you on twitter. follow me back and i can pm you my email.

This is a neat. I like the idea and implementation!

Reminds me a little of the .plan files from the old Quake days, mixed with twitter / social media.

http://floodyberry.com/carmack/plan.html

I've signed up. Here's my little log: http://littlelogs.co/rpgdan/

For a brief period I had a server that polled Twitter and updated a .plan file from my tweets, simply because I could, but that was two or three Twitter API versions ago and I've also been using fewer and fewer unix boxen since then. Part of me wants to revisit the concept and run a Twitter over QOTD (port 17) server.

I dig it - I'd like to be able to use twitter for this (I suppose I could, nobody's stopping me) however I find that the twitter platform isn't really conducive to this sort of application - too much noise. A domain-specific tool like this has a place, I think.

In my case it would probably document the lack of progress rather than the progress. It's pretty hard to make steady progress on a number of tasks in parallel, the cost of context switching is huge.

To counter this, I actually wrote a "Dont break the chain" app[1] that pulled contributions from all my local projects (since i have some that are not yet on github, some on bitbucket, etc)

The idea was that I'd be happy if I made progress on at least one of them in general. Of course, I didnt finish that one either :)

[1]https://github.com/vinodkd/dbtc

I disagree, I think the cost of context switching each day is small given you're already "resetting" by going to bed each night. Looking back at my logs I make small progress every day on one of my 3 or so different projects.

500 Server Error when I submitted my application, replaced description with "-" as fallenhitokiri mentioned.

Should be fixed now, but I've emailed you an invite in the meantime. Sorry!

I think this is what electronic science notebooks should look like.

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