Day One -> Markdown (with metadata)

or an endless journey for finding a better way for keeping a journal or writing blogs with no stress.
（DayOne の JSON を個別のメタデータ付きの Markdown にしたかった，という話）

tl;dr

I’ve just published a repo to Github called “dayone2md” which contains a silly tiny script for converting Day One’s JSON archive into Pandoc Markdown with YAML-metadata block.

Motivation

I’ve been keeping my thoughts or things happened in the day as a journal using Day One. I’m sure the app is one of the most well-made environment to write personal things.

Although I think Day One is, as a whole, quite smooth and worth paying the subscription fee, I just needed an alternative way to keep my entries safely, and in a less-cumbersome workflow to work with other dev tools. It would be nice to do writing with familiar tools like Atom, VSCode, and Vim. Ease of switching various formats for publishing them to my Hugo-enabled blog is another vital point.

What I think current Day One lacks is that there’s no option to export entries separately, with sane formatted metadata. Even though the app keeps entries as markdown, you can only create single file archive of JSON, or Markdown¹.

This is why I wrote it.