OhLife Alternative

It’s a shame that OhLife is shutting down. If you didn’t know what it was, it was a service where it periodically (eg; daily, weekly, monthly, depending on what you choose) sent you an email asking “How was your day today?”. You would just reply back to the same email describing your day, week, month, and it would save it in your account in OhLife.com.

And one of my favorite bits of the service was, it would include a random post from your life, saying; “Oh snap, remember this? 175 days ago you wrote…” (see above screenshot).

What I liked about the service was, it was not a burden, it was very easy to use, it didn’t force you to write. If you didn’t want, you would just ignore the reminder email and just enjoy the random post from your life.

Well, now that the service is shutting down, how can you record your life in a similar fashion?

OhLife Alternative via IFTTT

If you are not familiar with IFTTT (if this then that) service, then please check this post first. I have created a recipe in IFTTT that will do the following: Everytime you send an email with the subject #OhLife to trigger@recipe.ifttt.com it will save that email in your GoogleDocs. New entries will be added as a new row in the spreadsheet. Date and email content will be saved in the document. 

IFTTT Recipe: OhLife Alternative connects email to google-drive

Recipe URLhttps://ifttt.com/recipes/205247-ohlife-alternative

Setting Up Periodic Email Reminders

In order to achieve this, we will be using another recipe that I have created on IFTTT. This recipe will send you email reminders based on your preference. You can select which days of the week you want to receive the reminder email, and also at what time. First recipe (OhLife Alternative) above is a requirement for this recipe, so please make sure to activate that first. Otherwise your OhLife entries won’t be saved correctly. IFTTT Recipe: OhLife Reminder Emails connects date-time to email

Recipe URLhttps://ifttt.com/recipes/205787-ohlife-reminder-emails

Hope you found this workaround useful.

Update: Non-IFTTT Alternatives:

Since OhLife went down, number of other solutions came up. Here are some of them:

Let me know in the comments section if you know of any other alternatives, and I will add them to the list.

Update: 17 Oct 2014: IFTTT has updated the email to be trigger@recipe.ifttt.com instead of trigger@ifttt.com. So please update your recipe settings accordingly, otherwise your trigger won’t work.



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