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History — location-keyed life log

active active deadline none last tended 2026-05-28

A growing chronological backlog of places I’ve been — captured in whatever detail level feels right, displayed on the public site at /history, queryable by year or by place.

Goal

A complete-enough record of where I’ve been and when, so that:

  • I can answer “have I been to X?” / “when was I in Y?” instantly
  • I can look back at a year/season and see the geography of my life
  • A new entry can be added in <60s without thinking about format
  • The detail level grows organically — a one-liner today, an essay later when memory hits

Concrete success markers:

  • 50+ entries by end of 2026
  • /history page on the public site renders entries chronologically with a map view
  • One-command capture from anywhere in the vault

Why

Memory of where I’ve been decays fast and unpredictably. The dates I remember are anchored to specific moments — flights, weather, people — and those anchor points need a home. This is also the most direct expression of “living a life worth watching” — the visible substrate of portfolio-garden. It’s content that doesn’t need to be clever, only true.

Architecture

  • Storage: one markdown file per entry at projects/history/entries/<slug>.md
  • Slug convention: YYYY-MM-<place-kebab> (e.g., 2024-10-tokyo, 2025-07-seattle)
  • Frontmatter schema (see below)
  • Garden site: new /history page renders the collection chronologically, with grouping by year and a small pixel-art map
  • Capture: /history skill in second-brain — extract place/dates from a one-liner, write the entry, append a daily-log line

Frontmatter schema

---
title: "Tokyo — first visit"     # human-readable, sentence case
location:
  name: "Tokyo"
  country: "Japan"
  region: "Asia"                  # optional, for grouping
  lat: 35.6762                    # optional, for map view
  lng: 139.6503
dates:
  start: 2024-10-15
  end: 2024-10-22                 # optional — single-day visits omit end
tags: [history, japan, asia, first-visit]
status: evergreen                 # evergreen | seed (sparse, to flesh out later)
publish: true                     # opt-in to the public site
summary: "One-line summary for index views."
---

# Tokyo — first visit

> One-paragraph or one-sentence framing. What was the visit for, what shaped it.

## What I did
Prose, bullets, whatever fits. No template enforced.

## What stuck
The details I want to remember in 5 years.

## People
- <span class="missing-link" title="not published yet">x</span>

## Photos
*(pasted in or wikilinked — Obsidian handles attachments)*

What goes in vs. what doesn’t

In:

  • Cities/regions visited as a tourist
  • Cities lived in for any meaningful length
  • Significant single-day trips
  • Moves between cities

Out (for now):

  • Day-to-day in current home city (would drown the rest)
  • Strict precision on multi-month stays — start/end approximations are fine

Status

2026-05-28 — Project opened. Schema defined. Next: scaffold the /history page on the garden, then backfill the first few entries.

Open loops

  • Build /history page in emre-garden (new content collection + page template + map component)
  • Update scripts/sync.mjs in garden to pull projects/history/entries/ into the history collection
  • Pixel-art world map component for the page header
  • First 5 entries — backfill from recent memory (whatever Emre wants to add)
  • /history skill in second-brain for one-liner capture
  • Decide: list view default vs. map view default (probably list, map as toggle)
  • Year-grouping on the index page

Decisions log

  • 2026-05-28 — opened as project; chose location-keyed over pure-chronological because “where I was” is the strongest memory anchor
  • 2026-05-28 — projects/history/entries/ not topics/personal/history/ because this is an actively-growing ledger, not a settled topic
  • 2026-05-28 — frontmatter location is structured (name + country + optional coords) so the page can group + map without parsing free-text

Notes

  • entries — (directory of individual entries)
  • skill-spec — (seed — design for the /history capture skill)

Touches

  • portfolio-garden — adds a new collection + page
  • personal — this is the public-facing layer of personal log
  • content — long-form content surface (vs. the short-form IG warmup)
  • (none yet)