

Ask HN: Are you writing a journal? - mindrun

After I heard good things about writing a personal journal from some friends a few months ago, I also started writing one myself.<p>But I recently stopped writing because I noticed that the Application I was using is saving all entries completely unencrypted in the Cloud. I started searching around a bit but didn&#x27;t find a good alternative which keeps my notes save and also easily editable.<p>Because I don&#x27;t want to switch to writing into an analog notebook or something like that, it brought me to the point of thinking about providing a good alternative by myself.<p>Thus I&#x27;d like to hear some thoughts and ideas from other people who also like writing a journal. Do you write your thoughts down? If so, where?
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skylark
I keep a daily journal which I save in a Word document. I don't particularly
mind if it goes up in a ball of fire one day - I find that I never really go
back to look through what I've written in the past.

For me, the journal's purpose is not to document my life. The journal is a
daily check in - a tool which forces me to be honest about my current
situation and evaluate what I can be doing differently or better. There's just
something so real and raw about putting my thoughts into something physical.
It forces me to really grapple with the issues I'm facing in life and come up
with actionable solutions.

Even though that's my experience with journaling, it most likely won't be
yours as well. Journals turn the lens inwards and magnify the things which are
most important to you. Some people use journals to vent. Others just want to
document the experiences they live in life to keep a history of what they've
done.

You probably won't know what benefit a journal will give you until you just
start doing it. Give it a week or two - do it before you sleep or right when
you wake up. Before you know it, you'll be hooked. Or not, the cost is so low
you might as well give it a shot.

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manmukh
Were you using Day One? It stores unencrypted entries in iCloud/Dropbox and
has the weakest password protection system I've seen. Your password isn't even
synced across different devices, you need to set it each time for each device!
I haven't yet stopped using it but I'm looking to make the transition to
something else.

OneNote allows you to password protect and encrypt an entire section, so you
could make a journal section an store all of your entries in there. It works
quite well from my experience. Evernote also offers encryption but you can
only encrypt a selection of text and it can be inconvenient to have to encrypt
each entry separately. Both options have mobile/desktop/web apps.

Another option is a private Wordpress journal.

A lot of people here recommend using a physical journal and a pen (I'm
planning on going this route eventually). You could also use good ol' text
files synced with dropbox (or something else) and encrypt them yourself.

~~~
mindrun
Yep, that's the app I was using before I figured out that it doesn't encrypt
my entries. Also it doesn't have a web-view, right?

I thought it might be great if I would build a great-looking web-application
which also has a well-documented API (you can't say that of any great
journaling app out there).

I think especially for people who are traveling 'round the world - and don't
keep devices like an iPhone, an MacBook, etc. with them - it would be perfect
(many of them are still using Internet Cafés).

But of course, the most people are writing on their own devices. For them, we
could write some native apps later.

Another tiny question: Would you pay for a service like that? I mean a few
dollars /month. In my opinion, there's currently no complete service out
there, which focusses only on journaling.

Okay, maybe a few poor-designed and -developed ones.

~~~
manmukh
> Would you pay for a service like that?

I wouldn't. There are enough free options (e.g. onenote, email, physical
journal, etc.) that work just fine for me. I personally don't see the value in
paying for a service that uploads and syncs my journals, even if it has a
really nice interface.

~~~
johntash
Agreed. You'd have to come up with a good feature, other than just
syncing/looking pretty, to make it worth paying for.

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dangrover
I have kept a journal in a text file since 2011, synced via dropbox. It's
grown to be over a meg at this point. At that time, I was feeing depressed,
and it gave me tremendous sense of clarity and order to be able to put my
thoughts into writing and check in every day.

I haven't had this problem as much these days, but I have kept the habit. I
have a rule with myself that if I find myself ruminating over some stupid
thing that happened during the day, I may do so, but only in writing. For some
reason, typing my way through such thoughts, even for short periods of time,
tends to make them clearer and to more quickly reveal any
distortions/fallacies therein.

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skrinko
I don't journal as much as I would like. I have been using Day1 as well, but
lately started using Hemingway app on Mac. You can make the interface very
minimal to keep out distraction, and have in the background ready for
thoughts. It can analyze level of grammar if you please. Save where you want,
and what you do to secure it is your choice.

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arh68
I used to keep all my passwords in Emacs w/ Org Mode. You can encrypt a
heading, or an entire file, with a GPG key. This could work. Just store it in
Dropbox/etc. If you trust Dropbox's encryption, just use a simple j.txt as
manmukh says.

Or you could just email yourself, replying forever. That's pretty easy.

[link, almost forgot] [http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/encrypting-
files.html](http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/encrypting-files.html)

~~~
mindrun
Thanks for those suggestions! For hackers (who also mostly write on their pc)
this could be a way to journal. But for the most people, that's not really an
option.

I also think in the longer term, that's not the right way to accomplish this -
because it's not really made for journaling and thus also too complicated, in
my opinion.

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brudgers
I keep a journal on paper. In part because technology is a distraction both in
the moment and from a management perspective for exactly the reasons you
experienced. I've toyed with Emacs org-mode and Microsoft OneNote in the
cloud, but nothing really beats paper for me because I have control over the
process...and getting away from the computer means that I can wonder about the
answer to a question rather than stopping my writing and Googling it up.

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atmosx
I use a personal journal with 'vim'[1]. I write only when I feel like writing
to it, usually when I'm under stress. The articles are encrypted with GPG,
synced through my dropbox account.

[1] [https://github.com/jmcantrell/vim-
journal](https://github.com/jmcantrell/vim-journal)

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rb2k_
> Do you write your thoughts down?

No. But I'd be interested to hear why people would. What is the appeal?

(serious question)

~~~
brudgers
There are several reasons I've kept a journal:

\+ Writing is thinking.

\+ I believe it makes my writing better, even if only via the additional
practice.

\+ Journaling has been, at times, a sanity check. Writing about some craziness
in my life provides a way to stop ruminating over it.

\+ Journaling is a great way to explore ideas that I have.

Over the past three months or so. I've focused more on journaling as a writing
and exploration tool and much less as a safety valve over observations of
meanness or stupidity in the world or some sadness I might experience. Those
things are easy to write passionately about, however I'm generating enough
ideas I feel passionate about that I don't need to tap that resource.

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bluerail
Wow.. just today I blogged about how there is no good secure journal solution,
and ended up writing one for my own..

I am building one currently which stores the entries directly to cloud
services and without all boatload of features.. just for writing..

------
NhanH
I asked a similar question a month ago, you may find some of the answer there
useful:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8976690](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8976690)

