Comment by tlack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tlack | Hacker News Reader

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I've taken the odd approach of messaging myself in chat software.. in my case, I have "conversations" with myself in Telegram. I feel like I journal more when it's just text and unstructured, rather than, for instance, a detailed form.

It's not exactly what you are looking for, but has some good properties:

- Always easy to jump in to, since I use TG to chat with people all day long; works on all devices (I need to journal from desktop and mobile)

- Easy to forward in/out notes to/from others

- No formatting woes since it's pretty much open ended. Supports hash tags and search. Can easily find all media and links.

- Telegram already supports tons of different kinds of media files and attachments; can easily snap of a pic of what I'm doing

- Can easily export HTML archive of convo at any time for analysis in other software

With my setup you'd have trouble automatically injecting content from programs, but you could make a Telegram bot that does that work, and just have conversations with it instead of yourself. (Telegram's API is incredibly simple to get started with and doesn't even require webhooks)

Exactly for this purpose - using TG as a "personal logging/journaling" platform - I've long thought of building a bot. Since Telegram's bot API is very robust, simple to use and set up, it can be done easily.

I've imagined the bot to:

* save each message in the chat as a separate "log" in a text file that is saved on an online backup. This can be a private GitHub repo, OneDrive, etc.

* give a short summary/statistics of how much I wrote

* tag message with the hashtags I use

...etc.

I haven't got time to start it, but hopefully I do soon. How would you like this sort of a personal bot?

I'd love to check it out. I've wanted to write something similar.

In the past I played with exporting the log and then drawing a word cloud (by week) with Mathematica. It gives you some interesting insights into whats going on in your life in that period.

Other cool features that would be nice: structure extraction (i.e., msg myself `#food #lunch cheeseburger` and `#mood tired` and then building a CSV of only what I ate vs how I felt), reminders (to encourage you to journal every so often, or to quickly have the bot remind you to check on something 12 hours from now), automatically posting external stuff like uptime alerts, calendar entries or commit logs, and other stuff I can't think of right now.. :)

Oh! A friend of mine made a bot like that! https://github.com/martinthenext/daytobase

Yup, I remember taking a look at this bot and its code! It's great work put in by your friend, cheers to him :D

Though I really wanted my logs to be logged in a plaintext file, I'll give this a try again. Thanks!

Maybe related: I have been looking for a way to EASILY record voice notes in a geotagged and timestamped format. Easily here means with the touch of a button, anytime. I think an app by itself can not achieve this, because it requires too much attention. Ideally I would want to use a physical device remotely connected to the phone. Something like this:

https://www.aina-wireless.com/shop/aina-ptt-voice-responder/

But it's use case is push-to-talk messaging and not voice recording. But combined with the right app perhaps... Maybe I should look into chat apps like Telegram?

I'm pretty sure Telegram doesn't geotag voice notes, but I think bots can ask for your location, so it could work.

not sure if this is what you mean, but Voice2Mail lets you send email with mp3 attached and (I think) geotag.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.abelssoft....

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/voice2mail/id533391644

a big ask but would love for this to do speech to text also.

This is great! I was using something similar before creating ZenJournal. Alternatively, you can also:

- Create a private Twitter account

- Private Slack community/channel

- Private Keybase account (E2E encryption)

There are drawbacks with all these though because they are not specifically designed for logging but for fast social interaction over the web, it affects things like UI, security, readability, and searchability, the advantage is they already have a load of features as you outlined. A journaling app could learn a lot from the design patterns of low-friction social apps though.

- Private E-Mail account

I use Telegram the saved messages thread, which I have pinned to the top. You basically send messages to yourself.

I didn't think of using telegram, and that has easy arbitrary file attachments to go with it. I wonder how easy it is to grab the transcripts and transform them, I'll have to check it out!

It's really easy. In the chat context menu, go to Export Chat History. You can then pick what kind of media to export (aside from just the messages themselves). It produces semantically tagged HTML (mostly divs with .date, .from_name, .text, etc, wrapped in a basic head/body tag) in a folder of your choosing which you can then parse with Cheerio, BeautifulSoup, etc.

Another option is the MTProto API, it's pretty powerful, skip the middleman xD

How you find information. It looks like good for 2-3 days or week but after a month you could not able to find the information.

I'm using a similar approach, just instead chat/forward messages to a special private group (I think 'Saved' didn't exist when I set this up).

Then I've got a script (https://github.com/karlicoss/telegram2org) that checks for new messages in this group every hour or so (cron) and appends Org-mode formatted messages to a special file. There are some extra features, like automatically mapping select senders into org-mode tags (yes, I do keep tags for closest friends :D ).

That makes it always show up when I search something (adressing the problem of finding information), I also can easily transform it into a proper todo/task if necessary.

Using hashtags to tag messages can be helpful. Overall, Telegram has a nice search algorithm that plays well with hashtags too.

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