January 1st seemed to be a good day to install Brett Terpstra’s Slogger. Every night, its army of gnomes will go over my tweets, blog posts, completed to-dos, etc. and record them in a Day One journal entry. Not a replacement for a real journal, true, but better than anything I could do on my own.
It’s a Mac-only app that runs from the command line—not user friendly at all. Even so, the installation instructions are straightforward, with some caveats for the not-too-bright, like me:
- Plugin configuration is done in each individual plugin.rb file, not slogger_config.
- All config strings (URLs, file paths, usernames…) should be in quotes (“…”), even when in an array (i.e. in square brackets). The Twitter plugin instructions wrongly give an example without quotes.
- The Instapaper plugin doesn’t work since RSS feeds for folders are no longer supported. I’m still not switching to Pocket.
- You will need an IFTTT account to log your Facebook posts, using this recipe.
- Instructions for logging RunKeeper activity are convoluted, but work.
Slogger’s default time for sucking in your data is 11:50pm, when my laptop is usually in sleep mode. The scheduler should still be smart enough to start the app on wake-up. Nevertheless, it’s one more reason for me to get a used Mac Mini. In 2015, perhaps.