Entries in Life Archive Format

Entries are the primary written records in a life archive. An entry can represent a story, journal note, recipe, essay, document description, event, article, or any other item whose main content is text.

Each entry is a Markdown file under entries/.

entries/
  grandmothers-apple-pie-recipe.md
  first-day-in-brighton.md

Complete example

---
id: grandmothers-apple-pie-recipe
type: entry
title: Grandmother's Apple Pie Recipe
date: 2025-08-14
kind: recipe
tags:
  - family-cooking
  - family-recipe
collections:
  - family-recipes
people:
  - margaret-bennett
places:
  - brighton
files:
  - recipe-card.jpg
---

This recipe was written down after an afternoon cooking with Grandmother.

## Ingredients

- Apples
- Flour
- Cinnamon

![Original recipe card](files/documents/recipe-card.jpg)

Frontmatter fields

• type must be entry.
• id is the stable identity used by references and URLs. If omitted, the reference app derives it from the Markdown path without .md; an explicit id is recommended for long-lived archives.
• title is the display title. The reference app falls back to the id when it is absent, but portable archives should provide a title.
• date is normally an ISO calendar date in YYYY-MM-DD form. A predictable date format makes sorting and timeline rendering reliable.
• kind is an open classification such as story, journal, recipe, essay, note, or document. Renderers may use it for labels or filters.
• tags is a list of free-form descriptive strings.
• collections, people, and places contain ids of related entities.
• files contains filenames of related assets from files/. The current reference app resolves these references by filename, so filenames should be unique.

All list values should be YAML arrays, even when there is only one item.

Markdown body

Everything after the closing --- is the entry body. Standard Markdown headings, paragraphs, emphasis, lists, blockquotes, links, images, and fenced code blocks are supported.

## A section heading

Normal paragraph text with **strong emphasis** and a [related entry](entries/another-entry.md).

> A remembered quotation or important note.

Archive-relative links begin with a standard root name such as entries/, collections/, files/, or albums/. The renderer rewrites them to website routes without changing the source Markdown.

Relationship direction

References are explicit. Adding collections: [family-recipes] to an entry records the entry-to-collection relationship, but it does not automatically insert the entry into that collection's ordered item list. To make the entry appear on the collection page, also add entry:grandmothers-apple-pie-recipe to the collection's items field.

Keeping both sides explicit lets a collection control its membership and ordering without rewriting entries automatically.

Identity guidelines

• Keep ids stable after publication, even if a title changes.
• Prefer lowercase ASCII ids separated with hyphens.
• Do not reuse the same id for another entry, collection, person, or place.
• Treat filenames as organization and ids as identity; they may match, but they serve different purposes.