Prior to joining Micro.blog, I had a journal in Day One, which was the sole destination for all my personal writing. I still have the journal, mainly for stuff that I keep to myself, but since starting the blog, I always wondered how I could get my posts in there as well. It would be nice to collect everything I’ve written in a single place. In fact, there was a time I was considering building something that used Day One’s email to entry feature, just so I could achieve this.

I’ve since discovered, after reading this blog post, that Day One actually has an IFTTT integration. This means that it’s possible to setup an applet that takes new entries from an RSS feed, and add them as entries into a Day One journal.

I decided to give this a go, and it was quite simple to set up. I’m using the blog’s RSS feed as the source, and a new “Blog Journal” as the destination new entries will be created in. Setting up the integration with Day One was straight forward, however I had to make sure that the encryption mechanism of the new journal was “Standard” instead of “End-to-end”. This is slightly less secure but everything in that journal is going to be public anyway, so I’m not too concerned about that.

The Day One integration allows you to select the journal, any tags, and how the content is to look. This follows something resembling a template and allows the use of placeholders to select elements of the post, like the title and the body. The integration also allows you to specify the location and entry image, although I left that blank. In fact, I ran into trouble trying to set the entry image when a post didn’t have one: journal entries were being created with a generic IFTTT 404 image instead.

So far it’s been working well. I’ve only being writing short posts without a title — this will be the first long post with a title — but they’ve been showing up in Day One without any issues. There are still some unknowns about this integration. For example, I don’t know how images will work. I would hope that even though they’re links that Day One will handle them properly if you wanted to do something like make a physical book. It’s likely I’ll need to make a few tweaks before this is perfect.

But all-in-all, I’m pleased with this setup. It’s nice seeing everything I write show up in a single place now. In fact, I’m wondering if there are other things this integration could be useful for, now that I know that all that needs doing is setting up an RSS feed.