HTML Journal Format

The HTML Journal is a format for writing personal logs using hypertext. Miso Town provides a handy service for converting journals into atom feeds. I use this for my sketch book.

m15o, provides the following example:

<h1>m15o's Journal</h1>

<article>
  <h2>2022-06-09</h2>
  <p>Just added a page about the technical <a href="stack.html">stack</a> I'm using to build my <a href="projects.html">projects</a>.</p>
</article>

<article>
  <h2>2022-06-08</h2>
  <p>Wrote a page about <a href="small-net.html">the small net</a>.</p>
</article>

However, I personally use the following structure:

<h1>and's Journal</h1>
<aritcle>
    <h2 id="2026-01-10">2026-01-10</h2>
    <h3 id="writing-about-the-HTML-journal">Writing About THe HTML Journal</h3>
    <p>I think the HTML Journal is a pretty cool format.</p>
</aritcle>

<aritcle>
    <h2 id="2026-01-10">2026-01-10</h2>
    <h3 id="however">However...</h3>
    <p>I think the examples are missing some details journal.miso.town adds in.</p>
</aritcle>

The reason for this is my formating prevents the miso.town service from generating broken links. When it scrapes your journal page, it'll automatically generate an ID for the h2 tags. This ID is pulled from the contents of the header. I use an h3 tag to provide a named header (which can be optional).

Also, you RSS reader has to correctly process the backlinks correctly. So far in my testing, only Rad Reader handles them correctly. I'm sure there are others (I didn't test terminal RSS readers), but Rad Reader was the one I found most reliable.

The main problem sees to be not all readers handle the id entry correctly. Miso Town's service generates the following entry for one of my sketchbook entries: <id>https://www.sheeeeeeeep.art/sketch-book.html#2025-12-01</id>. Not all readers seem to recongize this.

I follow this formatting cause I firmly believe that subheaders should be addressable. I also don't want people subscribbing to my journal to have to deal with broken links. And, I'm writing this page cause these details seem absent from the standard despite being pretty important to having a correctly formatted and linked journal.