Here’s my Launch Center Pro action for creating meal review entries in Day One.
Tag Archives: automation
Coffee Log Followup
Jeff Mueller wrote an amazing piece explaining the technical details of my use of MultiMarkdown tables, Launch Center Pro, and Day One. He even wrote an application that helps with the encoding. Check it out.
These kind of logs can be expanded to apply to anything that you want to track: books, movies, beer, meals, etc. Josiah Wiebe has a pretty good list of actions.
Now that Publish by Day One has been released, you may see more of these entries on display on that platform. Day One has done a spectacular job of reducing the friction of putting content online with beautiful presentation. Here’s a slightly cropped version of my first coffee log post:
Shawn Blanc beat me to the punch, which is slightly unfair because he was a beta tester:). I did adapt some of the changes he made into my Coffee log action, including adding a title to the entry, adding a “Roaster” row, and moving the tags to the bottom.
Meals Tracker in Day One
As a follow up to yesterday’s post, here is my Launch Center Pro action for tracking where/what I ate every day. It’s the same concept, with the addition of setting a schedule on that action so that I get a notification every night at 9:30pm that reminds me to fill out the survey.
Day One Templates Using Launch Center Pro
Update (2014-07-07): Coffee Post Followup
Day One is a great system for journaling and note-taking. One of things I use it for is to keep track of the different coffees I buy and brew. Since this is something I track regularly, I’ve developed a method to pre-populate a Day One entry with a standard structure for my coffee journal. Here’s what it looks like:
Day One Templates
Using an action to launch Day One with some pre-populated text, combined with prompts and the new list prompts, makes for an easy way to enter some structured content in your journal. Let me explain. The structure for the entry is stored in a Launch Center Pro action. Here’s what that looks like:
dayone://post?entry=%23coffee%20%23log%0A%0A%7CCoffee%7C%7C%0A%7C%3A---%7C%3A---%7C%0A%7COrigin/Name%7C[prompt:Origin/Name]%7C%0A%7CBrew%20method%7C[list:Brew Method|AeroPress|Chemex|Drip|Espresso|French Press|Pour Over|Other]%7C%0A%7CBrewer%7C[prompt:Who brewed it?]%7C%0A%7CRating%7C[list:Rating|★☆☆|★★☆|★★★]%7C%0A%7CNotes%7C[prompt:Notes]%7C
Each field in the table is a prompt, so when I’m ready to log my coffee, I launch this action, answer brief survey, and voila!
You’ll notice for the brew method and rating, I’ve used a list prompt. This works well since the answers come from a limited set. And the final frame shows the raw markup, which renders as a tidy table in Day One. This concept can be applied for any type of entry you’re creating on a regular basis that has a defined structure. The new Launch Center Pro prompts afford a nice front-end for text input. You can extend this idea for other notes you want to put into your journal, using Launch Center Pro as the mechanism for polling and input. For example, I have another action which is scheduled to launch every evening that asks me what I had for each meal of the day.
