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 :)
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.