Creating a Word Cloud from Your Day One Entries

August 9, 2023 | Comment

A while back I wrote a post about querying the Day One database in which I teased more to come with this statement:

I wanted more detail than Day One offered and had ideas of how I could mine my entries in cool ways (more on that in a later post).

Well, this is that “later post”! I wanted to visualise my entries as a word cloud.

Massaging the data

In order to produce the cloud I needed to do two things: extract the data and then display it. Sounds simple doesn’t it? I quickly found that there were a … Read the rest

Day One Encryption

July 19, 2023 | Comment

TL;DR the Day One local database is not encrypted.

After my last post on querying the Day One database, I was asked the question: what happens if you have your journals encrypted?

Before we get into that, let’s look at the Day One encryption options. You can turn on encryption on a journal-by-journal basis and it is on by default. This must have changed at some point as my original journal is not encrypted and newer ones are. Despite being able to choose which journals are encrypted and which aren’t selectively there is only one encryption key meaning that … Read the rest

Querying the Day One Database

June 14, 2023 | Comment

WARNING! Make a copy of your database before trying any of this!

Why do it?

I have been using the Day One journaling app to keep a daily personal diary for many years now. I have been recording my mundane thoughts there for over seven years and have transcribed five paper diaries too giving me a total of 14 year held there.

That’s currently 4,267 entries and counting of which I know very little about other than the text itself. I wanted more detail than Day One offered and had ideas of how I could mine my entries in … Read the rest