Introduction
This thread is about the manner in which I export diary entries from Day One, import them into DEVONthink and enhance and use them. It effectively replaces my contributions on this old thread (which I’ll supplement to refer to this newer thread).
Why bother bringing Day One diary entries into DEVONthink?
Day One search is very poor and there is no way to construct any complex search query. It is also slow if you have thousands of entries. In addition, you can do things with records in DEVONthink (like transclusion) which you cannot do in Day One. I also add many more photos to my records in DEVONthink than I ever did when the entries were in Day One.
Day One is pleasant enough for writing daily diary entries—automatically adding to each the time, location and weather data. DEVONthink is perfect for enhancing and using those valuable records. For example, when you can so easily search records it encourages use of cross-reference links in Day One which makes the diary entries much more interesting (and, of course, more of a “rabbit hole”!).
Important warnings
When I started importing my Day One entries into DEVONthink I settled on a record naming format of Saturday 30 July 2022
. That is not the best format for automatic sorting of the records (in my case, within their yearly group). It’s more sensible to use the format 2022-07-30.md
(which enables sensible automatic sorting of the records by name) and I have now renamed all my diary records accordingly. However, Day One does not export the name of the weekday in the heading of each exported entry so I’ve made use of a custom date metadata field in DEVONthink (available only in the PRO edition) in which I store the full date. That affects how I use a Hazel renaming rule and also a script processing newly imported diary records (the rule and script will be explained later in this thread).
The result of that is this important warning: the procedure I’ll outline in this thread, and most of the scripts I’ll include, rely on the record naming convention mentioned in the previous paragraph. If you wish to adopt a different record naming convention you’ll probably need to amend the relevant Hazel rule and certainly many of the scripts accordingly.
The second important warning concerns Day One tags. The export procedure I use does not export tags you may have used in Day One. I simply initially re-created all of my Day One tags in DEVONthink (a lengthy, one-time process) but now use hashtags in my Day One diary entries. If you do that make sure that you have checked the DEVONthink preference Convert hashtags to tags
(under Preferences > Files
).
Finally, I am far from the world’s best programmer and there are undoubtedly other (and probably better) ways to do what I describe but what I have described works for me.
What you need (i.e., what I use)
- The outstandingly useful Hazel app.
- In Finder, folder dedicated to receive the entries exported from Day One. I’ll call that the Journal Folder.
- In DEVONthink PRO a
Temp
group where you manipulate the imported records before adding them to the appropriate year group in your database.
What follows
I’ll post separately in this thread, following this post:
- The export procedure and my Hazel rules for automating much of it.
- The import procedure and the DEVONthink smart rule I use to automate that.
- The scripts I use to enhance imported records (adding the name of the weekday, recreating the Day One links as item links in DEVONthink, converting hashtags to YAML front matter).
- Bonus scripts for working with imported Day One records.
Stephen