Journaling, Diaries and Programs?

[Archiver]

Hi folks,

Given the interest that many photographers have in recording the past in images, some of us might also be interested in journals and diaries, and how they are stored. I'm looking for some thoughts and suggestions about maintaining a long standing diary into the future. Do you keep a diary or journal, and if so, what do you use?

I've been keeping written journals for many years, since I was a kid. In 2004, I started to write my journal in Treepad, which gave me the many benefits of digital journaling: typing far faster than I write, having everything perfectly legible, and being able to back everything up in multiple places with no extra physical space required, not to mention the privacy of a secured computer.

After a few months, I moved everything to Microsoft Word, and now have one Word document per year for the last eleven years. They are all password protected and backed up across many harddrives and physical locations. My reasoning is that Word format is one of the formats most likely to be read in future programs, given its ubiquity. It allows formatting and text styles, unlike plain text.

At the moment, I'm looking at dedicated journal programs that allow day-by-day entries. These include DavidRM's The Journal and RedNotebook. This will allow me to access specific days much faster than scrolling through a long Word document, not to mention keep every single year in one easily accessible program.

My concern is that programs created by smaller companies might eventually no longer be supported, which would mean a huge migration of data to a new and supposedly better program some time in the future. I don't want to have my data locked into one program that will eventually go poof ten years in the future, and be a pain in the ass to migrate. Or are there ways around this?

Gents, what are your thoughts and experiences?

 

[JoeV]

Composition books and fountain pens. Or typewritten journal entries, 3-hole punched and bound. Yes, a bit more bulky than Word files. But I like the physicality of written or typed material. It also overlaps with my gear fetish, as fountain pens and manual typewriters enjoy a similar revival of interest as manual film cameras.

~Joe

PS: In answer to your question, stick with unformatted text files, they can be imported easily to almost any program.

Or make PDFs from scans of handwritten text. Memory is cheap, so storing PDFs isn't a big deal like it used to be.

 

[RichardP]

I am not sure that MS Word is even compatible between different versions. Maybe use TeX/LateX which is used in technical literature and bound to survive.

 

[Roger Hicks]

Another vote for at least one hard copy of ANYTHING you consider important -- and stash a copy at the back of the attic...

Who is ever going to bother going through PASSWORD-PROTECTED hard drives?

Cheers,

R.

 

[cz23]

No question in my mind: MS Word. In the world of short-lived technology, it's hard to imagine a format with more longevity, with MS Office's 94% market share. You can always save an annual rtf version, or even a txt version. But you can open a Word 97 doc in 2013.

And to avoid scrolling through a long document, format days or weeks with a heading and make a linked table of contents.

John

 

[Roger Hicks]

No question in my mind: MS Word. In the world of short-lived technology, it's hard to imagine a format with more longevity, with MS Office's 94% market share. You can always save an annual rtf version, or even a txt version. But you can open a Word 97 doc in 2013.

And to avoid scrolling through a long document, format days or weeks with a heading and make a linked table of contents.

John

Dear John,

Gosh! Sixteen years! Practically eternity! Even in 2015 it's still only 18 years...

It is still very easy for me to open and read the oldest document I own, which was printed in Amsterdam in 1602. And I've read documents on parchment written well before that.

Likewise, I've seen plenty of centuries-old frescos (hard copy again).

Cheers,

R.

 

[Daniel Teoli Jr.]

OP. Nope. Too anal for me. I wish I was a little more anal, but then I may miss out of the stuff I do get. So have to go with the flow. I have started to write down some stuff on Wordpress lately. I have lots of Tumblr's, maybe 45 of them. but I don't write on Tumblr much.

Here is the Wordpress. Works great as long as the electric is on. Just did this a couple min ago.

https://danielteolijr.wordpress.com/2015/04/10/dancing-queen-bride/

Notice...I turn all comments off. That is the opposite of most of you isn't it. Just learned how to do it now have to go back and change them all.

Hers is one where I did do some writing.

nsfw

https://danielteolijr.wordpress.com...ysical-negative-is-for-the-film-photographer/

 

[Archiver]

Thanks for the suggestions, folks. At one time, I was printing my digital journal files and putting them in folders, but the whole privacy/security thing bothered me, so I stopped printing them. As much as I like the immediacy and versatility of handwriting, the digital format is so much more convenient, easy to store, and secure. It's a bugger because I really like nice pens and notebooks, too.

I was considering Evernote, which I already use to store information from webpages like interesting forum threads and articles. But I'm still leery of Evernote's potential longevity. Some people write in a notebook, then scan or photograph the page and store it in Evernote, which could work as long as Evernote continues to be supported for many years.

I'll stick with Word for now and use the linked contents page, thanks for the suggestion, johnwolf. That will be easy because I already format months as Heading 1 and days as Heading 2. This could work even better than I thought.

 

[cz23]

One other thing that comes to mind is annually outputting the Word file to HTML and storing them all on a secure web site that is hosted online. That would consolidate everything into one collection that is stored off-site. The TOC links would still be valid and you could build a nice front-end interface. That seems like fun project and a good approach to integrating everything over the years.

I admire your commitment to journaling. I write but have never been able to stick with journaling.

John

 

[Archiver]

One other thing that comes to mind is annually outputting the Word file to HTML and storing them all on a secure web site that is hosted online. That would consolidate everything into one collection that is stored off-site. The TOC links would still be valid and you could build a nice front-end interface. That seems like fun project and a good approach to integrating everything over the years.

I admire your commitment to journaling. I write but have never been able to stick with journaling.

John

Not a bad idea at all, creating a secure website with table to contents could work well.

Journaling hasn't been a totally constant experience for me. There have been times when so much was going on that I haven't been able to sit and write for months, although these days I do quick retrospective entries for each day or week. Like anything else, it's a matter of making it important enough to do regularly, and after a while you find yourself in that habit.

The main payoff for me is when I read my entries much later in the future, often when I've forgotten the exact details that I wrote, and I'm delighted at the things it allows me to capture and remember. It ties in with photography as well, which has become a form of instant diary entry for me.

 

[daveleo]

HTML is by far the best choice for longevity and cross-platform / cross-browser readablity.
("Ubiquity" ? .... is that the right word?)

I would NOT use WORD to convert to HTML. I did that years back and it did not work because MS exports it's own version of "HTML" to keep their browser (IE ?) happy, and it never worked for my readers using other browsers. I simply learned to type HTML using a text editor and have been doing that since then (12 years?).

Check out some free, open-source HTML editors.

EDIT: I recommend HTML, because I think you want to include images? in your journal? If not, then just go with unformatted text files. Not pretty, but it's elemental and will never go out of date . Sadly though, you can't embed tags, or anchors or links to subjects as you want. So I am back to saying HTML will do what you want.

 

[Archiver]

Twenty Years of Digital Journaling

It's been almost nine years since I wrote the first post of this thread, and I've continued keeping a digital journal ever since. For anyone who is interested, here is a breakdown of how I've grown to organize things over the past twenty years.

- Microsoft Word is still the go. Word documents will be backwards compatible for the forseeable future. At one stage, I moved from the old .doc format to .docx because I upgraded Word, but everything else has remained the same.

- I make a monthly calendar style 5 x 7 grid using the Table function, and type the day/date into each square. As the month progresses, I type a few keywords into each square so I can see what the month was like at a glance.

- Headings: For the main body of each month, I use Heading 1 to title each month, Heading 2 to title each day, and Heading 3 for incidental things that I want to highlight. At the beginning of each month, I type out the days and dates for each month, highlight them all and convert to Heading 2. This creates a whole month's worth of day entries which can be filled in later.

- I write something for every day, even if it is just being at home.

- if there are notable or illustrative images for the day, I resize a few to 720p and embed them into the document at the appropriate places, and title them. So a photo heading might be, 'Southgate By Night | Leica M9 | Zeiss Distagon 35' or 'Jewelry at Salera's | Panasonic LX10'

- At the end of the document, I have sections devoted to photographic debriefing. Rather than put my self-feedback into the main body of the journal, it all goes into a section at the end to make it easier to find. So if I do a work event, I make a title with the name, place and date of the event, then write my experiences with gear, lighting situations, what worked, what could have been better, etc. These sections also include ruminations about gear and future events/gigs/trips. I often write pages and pages agonizing over what gear to bring to any given event or trip, then the experiences after those events occur.

- All documents are copied and backed up to three separate drives/locations at least once a week.

I also use Evernote as a mass storage device. When I find a useful or interesting article, I clip it into Evernote. Same with useful bits of information, or journal entries for when I'm traveling and don't have access to my Word documents. Lying on a hotel bed and bullet pointing the events of the day is a pleasant way to relax and strengthen memory. When I return home, I fire up Evernote and copy the journal entries into the Word document. I am loathe to use Evernote as the main journaling program because of potential security issues, and the need to have a standalone program which cannot instantly export data without a third party program.

Digital journals are incredible resources. Along with my daily photographic documentation and Google Maps location data, I am able to know exactly where I was and what I did on any given day. Going back through the journals allows me to see patterns in my thinking and life, and gives me a great deal of pleasure when remembering things. It's also helpful when someone wants to know what happened at any given time, I can just look it up. I know when I was given specific Christmas and birthday gifts, what I ate on most days, when I've seen movies or watched TV shows, everything. I even copy and paste forum posts and emails into the appropriate parts of my journals. It would be great to have a database which allows instant access to entries via keyword/hashtag or date, but this is as good as it gets for now.