% jt: a tool for maintaining a personal journal
% Lars Wirzenius

Introduction
============

I maintain a personal journal using Ikiwiki. `jt` is a tool to make
that easier by taking care of repetitive steps, such as creating new
Markdown files for journal entries, etc.

I mean `jt` to be a personal tool. It needs to work for me. If anyone
else finds it useful, that is great, but I'm unlikely to want to spend
much effort to make changes only for the benefit of others. That said,
patches are welcome.

This document is a description of `jt`, and also its executable
acceptance test suite when given to the `yarn` tool (another of my
personal projects).


Overview
========

My journal is a bit more than a journal. It is a "personal knowledge
base". But it's primarily a journal. There is a series of journal
entries, called **notes**, ordered in a sequential time order based on
the timestamp when the note was started. Notes can be tagged, using
the Ikiwiki tagging feature, and they are linked to topics.

* Notes are in a time series.
* Some, but not all, notes are grouped into topics, by having a topic
  page and pages related to the topic link to the topic page.
* Topics in my journal tend to be specific projects, or specific books
  I read.
* Notes are tagged, using ad hoc tags.
* Tags are mostly for indicating the type of a note: an idea, a rant,
  meeting minutes, etc.

Examples:

* A note about an idea for a product I have may be tagged
  "product-idea", but isn't linked to a topic.
* If I'm buying a new dishwasher, that would be a research topic, so
  it might have a topic page `research/2014/dishwasher`, and all notes
  about this get linked to that topic page. They may also be tagged,
  if that seems useful.

With a structure like this, Ikiwiki renders a (static) web site from
the journal source tree, and puts in all the HTML links between pages
to make it easy to find what I need. When that fails, I use `git grep`
in the source tree to find things.