Exporting my articles

Yesterday I saw a reply by @jasonleow about the ability to export posts from Lifelog in the Account page, so I decided to give it a try. I’ve been meaning to organize my writings and revisit previous posts to collect the ones I can republish in a collection of essays.

I initially downloaded the JSON export file, with the intention to reformat it using ChatGPT. ChatGPT complained that the file was corrupt and couldn’t extract the data properly, so I tried the Google Sheets route. I downloaded the Google Sheet as a CSV file and asked ChatGPT to reformat it. It was initially giving me the creation, publication, modification dates, as well as the word count (called “tags”) in 4 separate lines under the post title.

I asked for only the publish date and the word count to be on the same line. I also reformatted the word count to add a space between the number and the word, as well as remove the underscores before and after the word count. ChatGPT initially made this meta date blue and underlined, but I asked for it to be dark gray and not underlined.

I also asked ChatGPT to add a page break between articles.

It worked like a charm!

I asked for another export in markdown so I can have my articles in Ulysses (where I’ve stored the archive of 200WAD/Writelier, as well as some other writings).

One more thing to add: Not all posts show the word count. From row 53 onwards in the the Google Sheet export file the post body column is merged with the word count column. There are a few rows with the columns unmerged, but the word count cell is empty.

You can see the final document here.

P.S. I discovered the “unknown” word count issue while I was writing this post. I asked ChatGPT to fill in the word count where it’s missing and it did! BUT! I noticed a discrepancy in how Lifelog/ChatGPT counts words vs Word/Google Docs/online word counters. Lifelog/ChatGPT count I’m as 2 words and hyphenated words as separate words, as well, which isn’t the case with the other counting method (it took me over half an hour to get to the bottom of this discrepancy!)

P.P.S. The export file includes comments on the posts, but I didn’t export them. I’m actually not sure how many comments per post are included, since the total number of rows is the number of posts, not posts and comments (comments and their meta-data are included in columns that are part of the post rows). There are 3 comments at the bottom of the Google Sheet export file that don’t have post data (just comment data), which produced 3 empty posts (no title, no post body, just unknown publish date and unknown word count)

P.P.P.S. I just realized that the Google Sheet export continues to pull in new posts from the site! There’s no need to continue exporting the posts from Lifelog. I can just open the Google Sheet to see an updated archive! 😍