I love hockey and I go to a lot of Dallas Stars games during the season. Late last season, I decided to start chronicling the games. It’s been nearly a full season, so I thought I’d go through my process and see if any improvements jump out at me (for me, the act of writing allows me to work things through).
Each journal entry has two components: a Markdown file that has my pre-game thoughts, starting goaltenders, goals scored during the game, my post-game thoughts, and the three stars of the game. The second is another Markdown file with tweets from journalists covering the Stars, including:
- Sean Shapiro - Stars beat writer for The Athletic
- Matthew DeFranks - Stars beat writer for the Dallas Morning News
- Bruce LeVine - Co-Host for the Dallas Stars radio broadcasts
- Owen Newkirk - He's the other host for the Dallas Stars radio broadcasts
- Mike Heika - Senior Staff Writer for DallasStars.com
- And two blogs, Blackout Dallas and Defending Big D
Those tweets are run through an iOS Shortcut that cleans up the tweet for Markdown.
Typically, I'll write up my pre-game thoughts before the game, then proofread them while on the train to the American Airlines Center. Once there, the pre-game thoughts are copied and pasted to Facebook. During the game, I check Twitter during TV timeouts and clean up any I think contribute to telling the story of the game (in other words, no need to have 3 or 4 tweets saying Dallas scored). If goals are scored, I'll record them like so.
DAL - Seguin (16) from Klingberg and Heiskanen
After the final buzzer sounds, I hang out for a bit and await the three stars of the game.
The train ride home gives me a chance to decompress, organize my thoughts, and put those down. They're not super polished, in fact nothing with this is. It's mostly for me.
I double check the tweets I've saved to make sure they're formatted correctly, then run another shortcut that combines those two files into one and saves them to Evernote. Finally, if I took a picture, I'll drop that in, then update the address and the creation date to correspond with the date and start time of the game.
I've included an example here
With those being Markdown files, it'd be easy to include those in a Gatsby-powered blog.