Using mdBook to Keep a Personal Diary

I have not updated my blog for a LONG time. It seems that my blog is on the edge of distinction again history repeats itself. The post Twenty Two Plus Plus in memory of my undergraduate years has been staying in the _drafts folder for nearly three months. I NEED to finish it before it is too late 24歳、学生です.

The underlying reason is quite simple another new excuse I made to justify my laziness: I was struggling with graduation last summer semester. After I arrived at Ithaca, I found a new way to keep a personal diary/journal. I had tried lots of tools, including paper textbooks, Word, DayOne, OneNote, etc., to help myself keep a personal diary since I was a little boy. None of these attempts lasted for more than two months. But for now, I have successfully kept a diary for two months. Thanks to mdbook: Create book from markdown files. Like Gitbook but implemented in Rust.

Third-party applications are not reliable enough to keep a personal diary. Rich-text editors are just too troublesome for maintaining the diary. So I looked for open-source tools to help me write a book in Markdown. At first, I considered using GitBook. I thought it was an open-source project backed by GitHub. But it was not. gitbook-cli was abandoned and GitBook no longer provides offline services. Well, that sounds like “GitBook has committed suicide” to me.

Finally, I found mdBook, a perfect alternative.

$ brew install rustup-init
$ rustup-init
$ rustc --version
$ cargo install mdbook
$ mkdir 2019 && cd 2019
$ mdbook init

2019/
├── book
└── src
    ├── chapter_1.md
    └── SUMMARY.md

$ vim SUMMARY.md

# Summary

[Prefix](Prefix.md)

- [August](August/August.md)
    * [Thursday, August 29](August/08-29.md)
    * [Friday, August 30](August/08-30.md)
    * [Saturday, August 31](August/08-31.md)

- [September](September/September.md)
    * [Sunday, September 1](September/09-01.md)
    * [Monday, September 2](September/09-02.md)
    * [Tuesday, September 3](September/09-03.md)
    * [Wednesday, September 4](September/09-04.md)
    * [Thursday, September 5](September/09-05.md)
    * [Friday, September 6](September/09-06.md)
    * [Saturday, September 7](September/09-07.md)
    * [Sunday, September 8](September/09-08.md)
...

All set! I will try to update my blog soon.