Commonplace Log

Commonplace Log

A daily microblog functioning as a gratitude journal, media tracker, and commonplace book.

Live site: log.brennan.day
Source: github.com/brennanbrown/commonplace

Concept

A commonplace book is a personal notebook for collecting and curating: quotes, observations, media consumed, things worth remembering. This project makes that practice daily and public, with Git commits as the accountability mechanism.

Design goals:

Ultra-simple, brutalist — no CSS framework, monospace fonts, ~200 lines of CSS
No titles, tags, or images per entry — microblogging format
Posts grouped by month
Each content type colour-coded with an emoji prefix

Data Structure

Each daily entry is a Markdown file (src/posts/YYYY-MM-DD.md) with YAML frontmatter:

---
date: 2025-01-02
gratitude: "The silence of early morning before anyone else is awake."

books:
  - title: "The Dispossessed"
    author: "Ursula K. Le Guin"
    status: "reading"
    pages: 102

videos:
  - title: "Static Site Generators Explained"
    creator: "Fireship"
    duration: "12m"

music:
  - title: "Nightswimming"
    artist: "R.E.M."
    album: "Automatic for the People"

locations:
  - name: "Memorial Park Library"

quotes:
  - text: "..."
    source: "..."

notes: "..."
---

Colour System

Emoji	Type	Colour (Gruvbox)
🙏	Gratitude	Yellow (`#fabd2f`)
📚	Books	Blue (`#83a598`)
📺	Videos	Purple (`#d3869b`)
🎵	Music	Green (`#b8bb26`)
📍	Locations	Red (`#fb4934`)
💬	Quotes	Aqua (`#8ec07c`)
📝	Notes	Orange (`#fe8019`)

All fields are optional. Each rendered entry shows only the fields present that day.

Beeminder Integration

GitMinder tracks commits pushed to the GitHub repository. A new commit each day (a new .md file) satisfies the goal. Miss a day → pay. This removes the friction of deciding whether to write and replaces it with a financial commitment.

Technical Notes

Built with Eleventy (11ty). See Eleventy Gotchas for the timezone, HTML escaping, and collections bugs encountered during development — “simple” projects teach the most.

Table of Contents