Keeping a Journal with the Diary

Article ID:

ED20507

Provided by:
Acute Software

Last Updated:

2-Feb-2005

WARNING
If you intend to publish the information to the web it is important that you turn off Private Events, PC Usage and File Usage when you do the export, otherwise your private notes will be included.

TIP
If you know HTML you can customise how the pages are generated. There is a file in your diary folder called Style.css, which is the Cascading style sheet for all generated webpages.

You can edit this with notepad or your development tool to change the style of the pages created.

This article shows how you can keep a journal using Acute Softwares Diary and then publish it to a website.

Using the diary to keep notes

The diary is a great way to quickly jot down notes and reminders, for easy finding later on, but it is also useful to record your daily journal/thoughts for you to publish. The benefit of using the diary is that you can write in it even when you are not online, and you have a backup if the website goes out of business (or worse - starts charging you a monthly fee to keep a diary).

Export to HTML

From the File menu on the Diary Client, choose 'Export Appointments'.

Screen shot showing diary exporting

The screen appears, which lets you decide what sorts of events to export and how to export them. Turn off Private Events and leave the 'Output to HTML' selected then click OK.

After confirming that you want to continue, it takes a few moments to generate the web pages before saying 'Finished Exporting Data' - click 'Yes' to open the exported data and check that you have all the appointments you want to make public (and none that you don't).

NOTE - all HTML files are created in the default diary data folder, which is usually C:\Program Files\acute\netdiary\data.
There is one file created for each month D200501.html, D200502.html, etc and all files are linked together with an index at the top.

Transferring the Journal to your website

The last step is to get your information onto the web. There are 2 options:

Option 1 - Copy/Paste the entries to a blog / forum
Use this option if you do not have your own website and simply want the diary entries to go onto your blog or forum.
Open the exported HTML files (e.g. D200501.HTML) and copy and paste the text from your Browser into your online blog / forum.

Option 2 - uploading the files to your website
Use this option if you have FTP access to your own website (and know how to upload files).
Upload all the files like D*.HTML onto your website (the exact file name format is Dyyyymm.HTML where yyyy=year and mm=month) using your FTP program.

Then create a link to any of the pages - usually the current date is the best.

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