The other day I went down a rabbit hole of reading through some old LiveJournal posts written by a romantic interest from more than half a lifetime ago (he says as he crumbles into dust) and it reminded me how when you’re 19 years old you’d put just anything out there in your LiveJournal for public consumption. On one hand, yikes, 19-year-olds would put anything and everything out on the internet back in the day, but on the other it was fascinating to revisit all of the tech issues of the early 2000s like phone lines and AOL and Geocities and cellular phones having unlimited night and weekend minutes and to read what songs on a CD made a long-distance college girlfriend think of me.

I recently updated my installation of iA Writer and saw they’ve now got Apple Shortcuts functionality included, with one of the example Shortcuts being a way to automatically open up a text file saved dated with the day’s date and start a new line with the current time, all ready for typing out a diary entry. I thought that was pretty handy as a way to keep a local, more private diary. Not that this blog will be going away, but some things I’d want to type up for my own reference for the future and not necessarily for public consumption, and I had been trying to figure out a good way to separate the more private diary writing from the blog-style journal entries intended for public consumption. I had experimented previously with Day One, but what I really wanted was just something like a single text file I’d continuously append to.