Maybe I'm paranoid, but I would feel uncomfortable mailing my most personal thoughts to a server I don't control, or even using clear text email at all for that purpose.
Of course without the random previous entry. Maybe with google documents there's a way to do that too.
EDIT google word doesn't have scripting, but their spreadsheet does. Their automated forms is a tiny bit like what's needed [you can enter info & it's stored], but it's not emailed, and can't be configured with a random entry. Now that I think about it, MS Word disabled automated emails (due to spammers using it), so maybe google has too. But there seems no harm in allowing it to only the one verified & linked gmail address for the account. (Otherwise there may be a niche here).
Checking google spreadsheets, and you can email from it. Just tested, it works. There's a time-based "trigger". You should be able to email a form, in a htmlBody, and store the results so you can include a previous entry.
The scripting tool and documentation are excellent.
Made a spreadsheet. Made a google form ("how has your day been?" + a text area) - they automatically add their fields to the spreadsheet. Wrote a short script that selects a random row at random, and emails it to me + a link to the form. Added a trigger that runs that script at 8pm-9pm daily. [if anyone wants the script, I'll post it - please improve it!]
Some flaws: 1. I couldn't work out how to automatically embed a form in the email directly, neither using their embed code (an <iframe>) - it works if they email it to you (which you need to trigger manually), but also gives a warning "you are leaving this page"; 2. also couldn't work out how to initialize the form with the random previous entry (a blog post said you could, but that was in 2008) nor 2. writing my own form (need an URL for the action: seems you need a form key, which you can't get, for security reasons(?))
Boy browser programming sure is frustrating: browser locked up twice had to set it all up again; 7 sec load time for pages; weird cursor movement for editing (and also not vim); along with the above limitation. Though it probably doesn't help that I don't know what I'm doing :-)
function sendEmail() {
var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
var numRows = sheet.getLastRow() -1;// don't count first row
var selectedRow = Math.floor(Math.random() * numRows);
var dataRange = sheet.getRange(selectedRow+2, 1, 1, 2);// from A2, 1 row, 2 cols
var values = dataRange.getValues();
var date = values[0][0]; // 1st row, 1st col
var prev = values[0][1]; // 1st row, 2nd col
var message = "<HTML><BODY>"
+ '<a href="'+yourFormURLhere+'">goto form</a>'
+ '<BR>'
+ '<b>Oh snap! Remember this from '+date+'</b>'
+ '<BR>'
+ '<textarea rows="20" cols="60" name="prev">'
+ prev
+ '</textarea>'
+ '<font size=1>RemainingDailyQuota: '+ MailApp.getRemainingDailyQuota() +'<font>'
+ "</HTML></BODY>"
;
MailApp.sendEmail( yourAddressHere, "How did your day go?",
"", {htmlBody: message});
}
Protip: It turns out 8pm is not a good time for the trigger to send it, for you to record the day's events, if you keep odd hours like me and get up at 9pm sometimes...
EDIT the http://OhLife.com selection of the previous entry is more useful: they first choose whether it will be "one month ago" or "one week ago" etc, then work out that date, and then get the entry from that date (or I guess the next one if blank). It might turn out that for a particular person that always being reminded of "this time last week" is a very effective context (or some mix of them). Bonus: it's trivial to then describe the entry with that string, which is much more natural than some timedate format.
/curious
But the email would remind me to do it every day, and it'll be easier to look through old entries on Oh Life since it shows all entires on one page (though I guess there's nothing stopping me from just having one super-long text file, if that's what I want).
At least they have an export that looks solid.