I write private journal entries and public journal entries. The public ones get posted here. I had been looking for a way to get those public entries into Day One so then when I’m reviewing the “On this date…” feature of the app, I see not only my private Day One journal entries but also my WordPress posts from that date. First step was to bulk import all of my old WordPress posts (20+ years, crazy).

Next up was to find some way to make sure that new WordPress posts somehow got auto-imported into my Day One journal. Enter dowpy: a python script that pulls new WordPress entries into Day One.

I’ve had this script up and running for a few weeks now without error so figure it’s time to share it in case anyone else has a similar use case.

I run this via cron on my Mac. It grabs the ATOM feed of my website and pulls in new entries into a Day One Journal called, surprise, “WordPress Entries.”

https://github.com/sjimwillis/dowpy

For it to work you’ll probably want to:

• make sure it runs daily
• make sure to have full entries in your feed and not just excerpts
• it only pulls in what’s in your feed (so, if you want pages as well as posts in your feed you’ll need to make some changes to the stock WP feed)
• it only pulls in what’s in your feed, so if you want to backfill older posts to get caught up (I pulled in about 20 years of my older posts), read How to Bulk Import Posts into Day One.

It does a good enough job at handling links and images, though not perfect. I should also note that Apple really doesn’t want you to use cron. They want you to use launchd instead. I will spin up a config file for launchd when I get some time as that would allow the script to run even if my machine is asleep, which would be nice.