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Writing Your First Entry

Awesome — Diary is installed and you are ready to try it. Follow these steps to insert a Diary and write your first entry.

1. Insert the Diary macro

Open any page you can edit and click Edit. Type /Diary and pick Diary from the list, or insert it from the macro browser.

Screenshot of Confluence page showing open macro browser with highlighted Diary entry

Publish the page. You will see a freshly created Diary with no entries and a short welcome message.

Confluence page in view mode - an empty Diary showing the welcome message and the Click to write a new entry prompt above it

2. Write the entry

Make sure you are in view mode - this is the point of Diary, so you never need the page editor to maintain your Diary.

  1. Click Click to write a new entry… above the diary.

  2. Click once more inside the editor that opens, and start typing.

  3. Click Save.

the open editor with a sentence or two typed into it, the toolbar above, and the app's Save and Cancel buttons below the editor frame.

Your entry appears immediately, stamped with today's date, the current time, and your name. You never left the page. 🎉

The saved entry in view mode, with its date, time, and author name clearly readable, and the Edit entry and Delete entry buttons visible on it.

Diary takes the date and time from your browser's clock, so an entry written late at night carries your local date rather than a server's.

3. Fix a typo

Every entry you may change carries an Edit entry and a Delete entry button. Click Edit entry, change the words, and click Save - again without leaving view mode.

Deleting asks you to confirm first. Nothing is lost for good either way: every change is a new page version, so you can always revert the page.

4. Make it yours

In page edit mode, click the Diary macro and choose the configuration (pencil) button to change how it behaves. The two settings worth trying first:

  • Diary style - switch from Simple to Bubble to see each entry boxed beside its author's avatar.

  • Order Of Entries - newest first (the default) or oldest first, depending on whether your Diary reads like a changelog or a journal.

All ten settings are described in Macro Settings.

Next steps