Hoarder

I started to write about Basic Memory this afternoon, and that gave me an idea that turned into an evening of coaching Claude into helping me do some stuff:

I took my corpus of old micro.blog posts and migrated them into my notes. They’re all YAML-n-Markdown, so they could just be imported.

I did the same with my mono-topic Hugo posts. Same idea.

I made a script for the many, many daily posts I wrote over a few years, grateful that I stuck to a convention of organizing them with l2 headings: Each heading became a title of a new, atomized post. I did that because my daily posts could cover a lot, so now it’s all more searchable.

And I finally sat down with my DayOne journals, all exported as JSON, and turned them into Basic-Memory-ready Markdown (which is to say “Markdown”). That included not just my journals from as long as I’ve been using DayOne, but also the entire collection of 2,000 posts from my original blog – the one that started as MovableType, then became WordPress.

Oh, I also imported my Scribbles blog.

I’ll put the source material up somewhere safe, but for the first time I have about 25 years worth of journals, diary entries, blog posts, and other personal writing sitting in a repo in a mostly standard format, organized by source.

It all also caused me to look at a 15-year-old project I worked on when management came around and told my team we’d have to spend three weeks classifying 17 years worth of articles from 40 sites in a spreadsheet. I mustered my rudimentary Ruby and wrote autotaxonomizer in an afternoon, got a friendly dba to give me an article dump, sold my boss with a proof of concept, and reduced a three-week slog for 12 editors to each of them spending maybe 30 minutes filling out a spreadsheet with the keywords for their site categories.

Maybe the best part was after I talked the rest of the team through what I was going to do and noticed a text from my best work friend, Amy. I thought it was gonna be “awesome!” but it was “This sucks. I was looking forward to three weeks of just filling out a spreadsheet.”