Hello there. I’m in the process of moving from TiddlyWiki to Logseq but I have one issue with the Journal.
I used TiddlyWiki before to keep track of role playing sessions and the world-building (character sheets and stuff). I used to write the journal at irregular times not always strictly connected to the game session so I just named then “Journal ++numberOfJournals” basically, so just counting up “Journal 001”, Journal 002", “Journal 003” and so on. I had configured Tiddly to automatically increase the number and use it in the Title of the journal.
So I want to keep this naming scheme, especially because I want to import my Tiddlers into Logseq and keep my journal, but I’m not able to figure out how. From what I can tell, Logseq determines that pages are journals by the title on the condition it can be parsed to a date.
Is there a way to configure Logsec so I can keep my custom journal naming? I could just create new pages named that way but then they wouldn’t appear under Journal anymore. I also tried just putting a file named like this into the journal directory but Logseq doesn’t show it under Journals.
The benefit is I could keep my existing Journal in chronological order and all my links would still work, after importing my pages from TiddlyWiki. Just because my old one doesn’t use a regular date, doesn’t make it less of a journal.
Edit: Actually the format is more like {journal number} {name of entry} where name of entry is usually something important that happened that game session. For example: “0342 Visiting the Black Witch”
I guess you can imagine this as chapters of a story.
a journal is nothing more than a collection of notes associated to specific dates
If these pages carry no date information, they are not considered journals.
If the date information is not lost, would make more sense to use a script for renaming both the pages and their links, then continue with a normal journal.
listing pages in some order doesn’t need them to be journals
Both a script and a query can sort these pages by their name, and thus in chronological order.
If the order is arbitrary, would make more sense to “simply” add to each page two links to the previous/next page.
small chapters don’t need to be pages to begin with, they can be blocks of a single long page
If that’s the case, again a script could merge these chapters into a single page, as separate and chronologically ordered blocks.
I thought about renaming them and give them arbitrary dates, but that does seem inelegant to me. Putting them all in one giant page seems also not like the best Idea because its hundreds of chapters I accumulated for years. Putting them in pages would also be okay for me but the way the UI works (on the desktop at least) is that only the journal allows for scrolling through them seamlessly whereas for pages it can only be one open at a time.
Not pointless, they would keep the order of the entries but It’s obviously not pretty, starting at some point in the past with a random date and then counting up or something.
I guess keeping the journal as a list in a page is the only way to go.
I think you can do anything but we haven’t told you how mostly because we’re not convinced it’s useful going forward. That said, you could assign arbitrary dates to your notes, then add a JavaScript that changes the days to numbers (days since 2023 for example). Then all future journal pages would be saved with dates, but the title would change to a number when it’s displayed. Would that be what you want?
You could then keep the useful features of journals, such as referring to a date and then having that reference automatically show up at the bottom of that date’s journal page.
By default, it expects a date, but any string can be escaped therein with single quotes.
You would have to think of the way that best suits your needs to display them in your sequential order and describe it in the format definition.
If you have an existing graph, this will likely break things with any existing journal pages.
After changing the settings above at least a re-index will be required.
I would have backups before changes
When performing these changes, beware of unexpected errors due to caching (I would quit and reopen every time).
Thanks. I took a glimpse into the code and it seems like the custom page title format needs to at least contain some type of date formatting string otherwise it wont work. I can’t make it simply count up. I probably just stay away from the journal for my use case then.