lmorchard Journal Note
Overview
Appends a note to Les's daily Obsidian journal in his house style — either a full
## entry under # notes (session writeups, blog seeds) or a one-line bullet under
# TIL (quick learnings). Captured notes are raw material the daily-blog-post-composer
and weeknotes-blog-post-composer skills compose from later, so favor reusable detail
over polish.
Locate today's file
~/Documents/Obsidian/main/journals/<YYYY>/<YYYY-MM-DD>.md
Derive the path from the date: date "+%Y/%Y-%m-%d". The file usually already exists
(Obsidian daily template) with headings: # daily / today / tonight / tomorrow / this week / [[someday]] / followup / TIL / notes. Always Read it first, then insert
into the correct existing section — never reorder or rewrite other content (standup,
therapy, tasks stay untouched). If the file is missing, create it with at least # TIL
and # notes headings.
Two cases
1. Session note → ## subsection appended to the end of # notes. For "log what we
did", writeups, anything blog-worthy.
## <lowercase topic>
- problem / context in one line
- what was built + the stack, terse
- the interesting bit — the gotcha, war story, or "aha" (this is the blog hook)
- blog angles: a few bullets to pull from later
2. Quick learning → single bullet under # TIL. No subsection, one line.
- tailscale node IP forwarded :8065 but refused :2586 → the service was on the wrong host
When unsure which: a paragraph's worth of story → # notes; a single fact or lesson →
# TIL. A future to-do that came up → bullet under # followup.
House style (match the existing file)
- lowercase
##headings; terse bullets; first-person lowercase prose ("i ran…") [[wikilinks]]for projects, tools, people, entities- nest detail with tab indents
- blog-seed depth: enough to reconstruct the story weeks later, not a bare one-liner
Common mistakes
- Wrong section — full writeup is a
##under# notes; a single learning is a bullet under# TIL. Don't drop a paragraph into TIL. - Too shallow for a blog candidate — capture the narrative hook (the gotcha/war story), not just "set up X".
- Rewriting the file — Read and insert into the existing section; leave everything else alone.
- Over-polishing — keep it journal-terse; the blog composer skills do the polishing.