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:
Just hoping to get some ideas of key things I may have missed that would be fit for a journaling application :)
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I use Joplin for note-taking and journaling and I am pretty satisfied. As it is open source you could create your own plug-ins for data import, so that you don’t have to start from scratch.
I’ve thought of doing something similar and creating my own tool. Sadly, there are too many projects.
One feature that may be nice is a rating scale for various parts of one’s life. For example, professional, personal, family, and perspective on the day. Scale would be something like very bad, bad, meh, good, great. Then allow filtering entries with defined scale value.
Another feature that would be nice is defining goals and whether they were accomplished.
For me, I would like the journal to help find patterns that led to my perspective on various parts of my life and then become more disciplined to address items that made it more negative.
Thanks for taking this on! I look forward to using it when available.