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hpr_transcripts/hpr2145.txt

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+Episode: 2145
+Title: HPR2145: Daily notes and todo list with markdown
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2145/hpr2145.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:53:42
+
+---
+
+This is HPR episode 2,145 entitled, daily notes, and to do list with Markdown, it is hosted
+by Norrist and is about 25 minutes long.
+The summary is how I use Markdown and get to keep up with what I do.
+This episode of HPR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
+Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
+Get your web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
+I'm going to record an episode about about a method I use, note, and keep up with what
+I've done for the day, have something to look back on, and also to kind of keep a simple
+to-do list, it's not like a to-do manager, a list of it, and I want to put somewhere,
+then I'll forget.
+Fundamental to the way I take notes and the way I keep my lists is that I use Markdown
+to do it, and I know Markdown has been discussed on the show before, specifically when it comes
+to like, I remember discussions about Markdown and use Markdown, I'm not going to do a whole
+show.
+What Markdown is, but I'll talk a little bit about, I will talk a little bit about
+syntax, Markdown syntax that I use, and I will say this, Markdown is what I like about
+Markdown is that it's syntax is simple and it doesn't get in your way, you can write
+something without being distracted by, so just as a quick aside, one of my previous jobs
+is I had to write some documentation, I had to write a lot of docs, and I did it in Microsoft's
+Word, and it would get so caught up in like, what bullets and font sizes, how many tabs
+I would get so frustrated with myself, because I know I'm like, why can't I just sit down
+and write stuff?
+So, I didn't know about Markdown at the time, it may not have even at the time, but I knew
+I wanted Markdown, I just didn't know what it was, now that I have it, I use it just about
+anywhere I can, especially when it comes to documentation, like it was just made for
+writing documents.
+But also, you know, like this whole episode is about, I use it note-taking, it's sort
+of another, it's not quite a central part of this, is that I use Git along, in this process
+I use to store my documents that way, I can store my lists and my notes that way I have
+a record, you know, I can look back on, but also if you use something like GitHub or Git
+Lab or whatever your web base Git repository of choice is, it probably, as far as I know,
+most of them render Markdown into some nice looking HTML, so what I'll do is, if I need
+to look back on my notes or read something or read my to-do list, I don't normally open
+up these text documents that I'm going to talk about in a few minutes, normally I look
+at the Git repository web page, it's easy to read, another big advantage of Markdown is
+that it's legible and pretty easy to look at inside GitHub, so a few reasons I really
+like Markdown, if I haven't already talked enough about it, I know I've already said
+it's distractionless, the syntax simple and easy to remember, with some Markdowns you have
+to, like if you're making a header, you have to make the header syntax before and after the
+line and you have to match them up, you know, if you make like a, whatever it is, you know, say for
+like a wiki Markdown, you have to make, you know, some weird syntax thing at the beginning
+and at the end of the line to make a proper header, but with Markdown, you just make, you put
+a single hashmark at the beginning, that's H1, and when I say hashmark, I mean like the Tiktok
+sign or the Octo Thorpe or whatever, whatever you won't call it, I'm going to call it a hashmark.
+And if you want to make H3, you know, you do three hashmarks, my point is it's simple syntax,
+you don't have to think much about it, I don't catch myself having to go back to the documentation,
+I have to remember how to do it, it's easy to get the hang of. Another good thing about Markdown
+is that it's human readable even in its unrendered form, so the Markdown syntax is kind of out of the
+way, so even if you're looking at the playing Markdown unrendered, it's still easy to read and
+nice to look at, you know, I said, I'll look at when I'm going to review something, I'll look at
+the rendered page on GitHub, but that's just because, I mean a lot of that is just because it's in
+my browser, it's open, I've got a bookmark for it, it's not too difficult to go back and grab
+the individual file. You can embed in line HTML if you want to, so if you've got some images,
+something else that you want to put inside the Markdown, you can just put an image tag or a code tag,
+whatever HTML tags you want, normally when you view Markdown document after it's been converted to
+any HTML you put in the Markdown will be outputted HTML, and speaking of that, the last advantage I
+have down using Markdown is that it's really easy to convert from Markdown to another format. I
+know Markdown was sort of created to have an easy way to write HTML, and most of the Markdown tools
+available are just taking your Markdown and converting it to HTML, especially if you use
+something like PanDoc, which I feel like has been mentioned on the show before, but if you haven't
+looked at PanDoc and you do anything with documents at all, you need to stop what you're doing right
+now, go look at PanDoc, it is some amazing software, but if you use something like PanDoc with Markdown,
+you can convert Markdown into anything you can think of. I'm not even going to begin to list,
+look at PanDoc, it's so enough about the wise, let's talk a little bit about the how.
+So the first thing I do is I have a document just called todo.md or todo.mark.
+At the top of it, I've got a single hashmark and the word to do, so I know I've got a big header
+at the top of the page that says this is your to-do list, and then I divide it up into things I can do now
+and things later that are maybe a week away, and then I've got sort of at the bottom, I've got
+something long-term or projects that are the things that I probably can't do anything about
+today, but just sort of a list of things that I don't want to lose track of, and the things I can do
+now, the things I can do in a little bit in the long-term project, each one of those sections has
+a H3 or three little hashmarks. At the beginning of the section, and then for each item underneath it,
+I use the bullets, which in markdown is an asterisk or star-sunt, whatever you want to call it,
+and that, you know, for each item, I just have a asterisk, what I need to do, and then, you know,
+I can add to it or take away from it, or if there's something, if there's something that I've done,
+but I want to maybe still remember it for a day or two. Markdown has a pretty simple syntax for
+strikeout, so instead of just deleting the line, I'll mark it with the strikeout symbols, which is
+a couple of tildes, and that'll mark the line at a strike-through, or I'll just, you know, if I just
+mark something down, so I'll remember it, and then I did it, and I don't care about anymore, I'll just,
+so that's the to-do page, that's pretty simple, I know there wasn't anything revolutionary there,
+anybody who's ever made it to-do list has probably done something very similar, even in markdown.
+Okay, so sort of the key to this process, and the only reason that I can remember to use this with
+any regularity, is I have a launcher that sits on my desktop, and then when I click it,
+it automatically opens my editor with today's page for notes, so I have a different page
+for a different page of notes for every day, so when I click on this launcher, if today's page
+of notes doesn't exist, it will create it for me, and I'll also fill it out a little bit,
+so just sort of as a skeleton blank daily note document, I have a divided up into three sections,
+well first I have the date at the top with a single hash mark, so it's in a, when it's rendered,
+it's H1 tag with today's date, and then I have three separate sections, each section has hash marks
+in front of it, so the sections are projects, and this is like any sort of long-term project I'm
+working on, but I did something with that project today, I'll record it somewhere under the project
+et cetera, I have one for tickets, so we have like at work, we have a ticket tracking system,
+and I don't do a lot of stuff with our ticket system, but I do two or three things a day,
+and so whenever I do something in there, I just like to keep up with it,
+mostly because someone's going to come back later and ask me about it, and I want to have
+if I want to have something to jog my memory about what I did, and I feel like too, I can keep a
+little, I can keep more personal notes in that my daily task tracker, then I can in the
+ticketing system, so in the ticketing system when I do something, I'll put a note in there, but
+because a lot of times those tickets get seen by customers, managers, I don't always,
+I can't always put all the details that I might need to come back to it, so section one project,
+section two tickets, and the last section is for walk-ups, so a big part of what I do,
+unplanned and unscheduled, and if it weren't for this it would be untracked, so this is just someone
+sent me an email or walking up to my desk or sent me an IAM saying, asking me a question about
+something, how does this work, or where did this go, or why is this broken, or can you do this from
+me, can you fix this from me, can you complete this task, and if it's, if it's something big, I'll say
+I want to go back, make a ticket, and I'll answer to the ticketing system, but a lot of times it's
+something small, so I'll just go and do it for them, but again I want a record of it just for a
+lot of the same reason, I'll mark it down on walk-ups, and I'll keep the tasks similar to I did
+to do page, so under eat section, I'll just make a bullet with the asterisk, what I did, and then
+sometimes I don't do this every day, but sometimes if there's something that doesn't fit well,
+in those three I'll add a fourth section at the bottom, or if it's something that I want to take
+sort of more extensive notes on, and not necessarily clutter up one of the other sections in there,
+I'll do that, just as an example, we have a development environment that I wanted to make,
+some changes to, and you know, change, you know, three or four different IP addresses,
+I wanted a place that I could sort of write the old ones and the new ones down, and have a place
+I could always go back and look, and that didn't really fit anywhere in the other three sections,
+so I just kind of made a chart down at the bottom, you know, whatever day I did this, I made a chart
+like down at the bottom of, you know, the old addresses, you get the idea. Okay, so I've mentioned
+the launcher, and I'm going to talk a little bit through how the launcher works, but I'll also
+have some show notes, written in, mark down, that I'll upload with the show, so you can kind of see,
+I know, it doesn't really always, it's not always helpful to hear someone read out a script,
+so I'm not going to do that, I'll kind of talk through it, and some of the different parts of it,
+but I'll put the whole thing in this, go back and look at those. Now one little caveat before I get
+started, working on the script is that if you primarily work on Linux, this script may look a
+little weirdy, and that's because I use a Mac at work, it's just, it's what we use, it's what we're
+given, it makes a lot of things easier, there's stuff like email, and some other apps that we
+need that won't work on Linux, but still, if you're not familiar with Macs, it comes with
+a free BSD runtime, so you can open a terminal, and most of the stuff you're used to be in their
+own Linux, on a Mac, some of the commands are a little different, which is why I'm bringing this up,
+but there's nothing in here that you couldn't do on a Linux system, and there's so many different
+desktop, environment, terminals, and editor, there's no way for me to make a script that would work,
+for everybody, but if this is something you're interested in using, it wouldn't be too hard to
+modify, the launcher where you put it, how you launch it, the specific commands in it, so anyway,
+if you have a Mac, this will probably work, you'll have to change a few paths, a few paths,
+fit your user instead of mine, but so the first thing that the script does is sets up some variables,
+the first one names the daily file, so I said I've got a different file, a task for every day,
+so the first one says okay, today's file should be named this, the second thing is it sets
+paths, so where all these files are stored, the to-do file and all of these daily files are stored
+in place, so there's a variable called daily path that says where that is, I have a lock file variable,
+so when I first started doing this, I would catch myself launching the script multiple times,
+and that kind of messed up, one of the steps in it, I'll tell you about in a second,
+as the last step is it spell checks everything, so if I launched it one time and I launched it a second
+time, it would just kind of mess up the spell check step, and sometimes I would end up if I close
+them out of order, I would lose some work, so what I did was I made a lock file, so if I,
+if the script is launched, it writes a lock file, if I try to launch it again, it'll say hey,
+there's a lock file, we'll get to that part in a second, but there's of the four variables that
+are in the beginning of the script, the third one is what the lock file should be, and the fourth one
+is the to-do file, so the first document I talked about to-do.md, so the first part of the script
+is pretty is for the lock file, and this is pretty basic 90% sure if you just search for
+bash lock file, you'd come across the same code that is, so I just, I found it somewhere
+in out mirrorware, I copied it, it works, but it says there's a, if the lock file exists,
+then echo, the lock file is present, do you want to continue, press yes or no, press yes, it
+continues, if you press no it exits, that's pretty, and then if the lock file doesn't exist,
+when you start the script, if the lock file doesn't exist, it will create a lock, and I know a lock
+file isn't the 100% best way to ensure a script doesn't run multiple times, and a lot of use cases,
+I wouldn't recommend a lock file, there's better ways to do it, but in this particular case,
+since it's just me doing it, and I'm probably not, probably not going to miss this up, so lock file is
+okay, so after we checked for the presence of the lock file, we checked for the presence of the
+daily, so if the file, if the file for today's task doesn't exist, if it does exist, it just moves on,
+if it doesn't exist, it will create sort of a skeleton for me, and I've already talked, sort of talk
+through what that is, you know, it's the date, and then a header for each thing I want to work on
+that day, and it builds it just by, you know, echoing something with a double redirects on to the
+daily file variable, so just a series of echo statements that builds out the skeleton of what I'd
+like to do for the day, okay, so once, so far in the script, we check for a lock file, and we check
+for the daily task file, and if it doesn't exist, the next step is we open the daily task file on our
+editor, on the Mac, I use a program called Text Wrangler, you can probably do this when you text
+editor, one thing that if you use a different editor, with Text Wrangler, the command is user local
+bin edit, and then I give it the dash w flag, and what that does is that makes, a lot of times when
+you open a program from, when you open a GUI program from the command line, it'll just open the program,
+and then return you back to the shell, and that's what edit does by default, but I don't want that,
+I won't, any, when this script opens the editor, I want the script to stop until the editor closes,
+because there's some things that are going to happen after I close the editor, I don't want them to
+happen until I close, so if you use a different editor, that's just some, you need to figure out that
+step, and it may happen by default, not every GUI program does, you know, does, does that where it,
+you know, when you launch, most GUI programs, when you launch it, it'll hold the shell open,
+and won't continue with the script until you close whatever, and that's the behavior you.
+So I'll click on the launcher, it'll run through this script, it'll launch the editor, I'll do whatever,
+you know, I'll type, sometimes I'll leave it open for a while, sometimes I'll open it, type one
+thing in it, and close it, but either way, whenever I'm done with it, I'll press the X, it closes,
+and then it continues in the script, so after the line in the script to open the editor,
+it's spell checks to document with a spell, that's ASP, and if you don't, this is another,
+just like PandaC, I'm gonna say, I'm not gonna do an episode on PandaC, I'm not gonna do an
+episode on ASP, but if you do not know what ASP is, you start what you're doing right now,
+and go check it out, it is by far the best spell check, and I'm a terrible
+Speller, if it wasn't for a spell check, I would look like I hadn't been to school, I cannot
+spell at all, and with a lot of programs, like I can misspell something so badly, that the spell
+checker doesn't know how to fix it, it is very rare that I spell something so badly that ASP
+doesn't know how to fix it, like if I misspell a word and it doesn't recognize, it'll give me like
+10 different things, did you mean this, you know, and 99% of the time what I actually meant
+is in the list, and with ASP you can add, you know, it can learn words, if you have, like I have a lot
+of sort of jargon, only I would use or only use in my company or sort of industry, that I don't
+want to, I don't want it to trip on, and so you can add that, and ASP is probably just as key
+to this whole process, anything else I've talked about, so when I close the document, ASP
+checks the daily file, it also checks the to-do file, now I don't have the script automatically
+open the to-do file, every time I launch it, but I say probably 10 or 15% of the times when I do
+launch this script, I go ahead and open up the to-do file anyway, either, you know, maybe in another
+editor or in the same editor in the same window or something, but it's frequent enough that I have
+the to-do file open, then I'll spell check it in this process, so once I've done the spell check,
+we'll remove the lock file, and then I'll remove the readme, and I haven't talked about the readme yet,
+so this is probably going to be, so I'll stop right here and kind of say what the read, if you've
+ever looked at a project on GitHub or in GitLab or whatever, usually when you open up the project page,
+you'll see a list of files, and then underneath it there'll be some word describing what that
+file is, so what most of the web-based Git repositories do is if you have a file in that repository,
+in the root of it, that's called readme, and readme.md, or there's some other formats that it can do,
+whenever you open that up, it'll automatically display the readme as HTML, even though it's marked down,
+so what I do, and I'll walk through the steps in a second, is every time I close this script,
+I rebuild the readme file by echoing the to-do list, the to-do.markdown at the top, and then all the
+daily files, so if you look at the readme file, the first thing you'll see is the to-do.markdown,
+and then in order, start today going back in time until the beginning, you'll see all of my
+daily notes, so I've got separate to-do document, I've got separate documents for every day,
+but all of those are combined in a way that works good for me into a single readme document,
+so most of the time when I want to go back, and look, I have this readme document bookmark,
+it's one of the, you know, few bookmarks I actually have in my browser, I'll just click on that,
+it opens the readme page, it's all right there, so after that diversion, we'll come back to the script,
+so we do the editing, we do the spell checking, we remove the lock file, and then the first part
+of building that big readme is I need to delete the older readme, so I arm the readme,
+then I cat the to-do file to the readme, and then I have a for loop where it lists all the
+markdown file, and then it cats them to the read, and then there's an echo at the end of that,
+they just put them blank line, so this one kind of weird thing about markdown is that
+sometimes I find myself having to add some extra empty lines to make it render correctly,
+and this is one that you'll see, if you ever see just an echo going directly, if you ever see
+just a command that's just echo redirecting to a file, that's what it's doing in this script,
+it's just making it, so the last part of this script is that the get check-in process, so I use
+get, but if you have another, if you want to use a carry-all or CVS or whatever, or nothing,
+but I like using get for a handful of reasons that I've talked about before, but there's just the
+last line in the script is CD into the folder where all the stuff is, doing a get add, which adds
+any new files, so every day I create a new file you're going to add, get add command and get commit,
+get commit command, and usually with a get, when you do a commit, you want to have something
+useful in the commit message, but when you automate get commits like this, you get a little harder
+to do, so both of the time when I automate a get commit, I just have the commit message be the time
+stamp, and I do that in this case with a date commit, so get commit and then a get push origin master,
+you know, pushes everything I just did, including the brand new markdown file up to get server,
+so I'm going to summarize all this one more time, because I know I'm like a lot,
+but, you know, again, too, I'll have some, so just to summarize the script, first thing it does is
+set up a few variable names, the next part, it checks for a log file, if it exists, delete it,
+move on, or if it doesn't exist, it just keeps on going, and create a log file, the next part of
+the script looks for the daily file, if it is there, it moves on, if it's not there, it sort of builds
+out a skeleton daily file for me, then it opens the daily file, and then when I'm done with that,
+I close the editor, spell checks, the daily file, and the to do file, then it removes the lock file,
+and then we rebuild the readme, the first step of rebuilding the readme old readme,
+you can't the to do file to the read, all the daily files to check it in to get, it's as simple as that,
+that's all I got for today, you guys have a good
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