After multiple years of wishing someone else would make a selfhosted journal (since I don’t want to pay a company a subscription to take all of my most intimate and personal thoughts, habits, and data), I finally decided to tackle my ignorance of Frontend Development and started building a selfhosted journaling application. Originally, it started out as wanting to track my sleep and habits related to try and figure out in a data-driven manner as to why I slept great some nights and why I didn’t on others, but has evolved a bit from there.

Current features I have include:

  • Encrypted entries within the Database
  • Multiple Users
  • Light mode/Dark mode
  • Daily Journaling with a ‘unique’ two-dimensional take on logging daily sentiment
  • Hierarchical tagging tools for Entries
  • Sleep Journaling to track sleep quality, duration, energy, and time spent awake (yay, insomnia)
  • A Filterable Timeline view to see all of your past entries on one page

Things Im still working on:

  • CSS Styling
  • Customizable Themes
  • UX Design for some key points (adding tags, settings/options, user creation)

Things I plan to add:

  • Habit Tracking (but with ‘scalar’ tracking instead of simple Y/N tracking since that doesn’t work with my brain)
  • Importing of sleep/health data from an Apple Watch
  • Importing from different apps (Such as Daylio/LunaTask)
  • Templating
  • Gratitude Journaling/Other Journal Types
  • Graphs and Stats that actually use all of the data you’ve stored
  • Reactive UX
    • This one will be a long work in progress, most likely. I am using VUE, so it’s definitely possible, however I have gone into this with a desktop design, and would need to completely redesign/work with someone who can help teach me how to do reactive frontend design with Vue

Things I am debating:

  • Editing past entries.

    • I feel like a Journal should be a state of the past, and therefore shouldn’t be edited once it’s been created. I know people will likely want to edit entries, but I think it goes against the purpose of a journal

  • Images in Entries

    • I don’t personally have a need/desire for adding images to my entries, but I know that n=1 in this realm. Just curious if other people actually do this, or if having the private text sanctum is most important in a journal.

Some initial UX pics:

Journal Entry Page

Daily Journal Entry Timeline

Sleep Journal Entry Timeline

Just hoping to get some ideas of key things I may have missed that would be fit for a journaling application :)