drboblog

I’ve been keeping a personal diary for a while, but recently I’ve found that my previous storage method for it – keeping each day’s entry in a separate file, stored in a folder hierarchy – was getting too unwieldy. That’s why over the last few weeks I’ve written a small program to manage a diary.

I initially started writing it in Vala, but I found that I was having to put in dirty hacks every couple of tens of lines just to get the simplest things working with an SQLite database. Either due to my own lack of knowledge of Vala, or teething problems for the language and its bindings, I couldn’t get it to work, so about a week ago I scrapped it and ported the program to old-fashioned C.

So here it is: version 0.1 of my diary program. It supports basic editing of diary entries, a calendar view of the month and the ability to add “links” to each entry. A “link” is something which connects the diary entry to the wider world, much like a hyperlink connects one web page to another. At the moment only “URI”, “file” and “note” link types are supported, but in the future I plan for one to be able to link to anything from an F-Spot album to a section of a chat log in Empathy. Such links would allow references to conversations, e-mails, photo albums (etc.) in diary entries to be easily followed to find the goodies mentioned.

I also have plans to add Evolution calendar integration, as well as potential integration with Mugshot. It would be nice to see diary entries which can show all of what happened on that day, from doctor’s appointments in Evolution to the songs Mugshot says you listened to.

Keeping my feet more grounded in reality, however, I think the next thing on the agenda is encryption for the database the diary uses, so your darkest secrets aren’t so easily discovered.

To get it, you can either download the tarball or get the latest bzr tree from my website using the following command:

bzr branch http://tecnocode.co.uk/diary/

Thanks to people in the comments for pointing out a better way of branching.

The only requirements are gtk+-2.0 >= 2.12, sqlite3 and gtkspell-2.0, and it’s built in the usual fashion.

Feedback is welcomed warmly and given somewhere to stay for the night.