Looking for a self hosted diary type of service. Where I can login and write small topics, ideas, tag them and date them. No need for public access.
Any recommendations?
Edit: anybody using monicahq or has experience with it?
Clarification: indeed I could use a general note taking app for this task. I already host and use silverbullet for general notes and such. I am looking at something more focused on daily events and connections. Like noting people met, sport activities and feedbacks, names, places… So tagging and date would be central, but as well as connections to calendar and contacts, and who knows what else… So I want to explore existing more advanced, more specialized apps.
Edit2: I ended up with BookStack. MonicaHQ seems very nice but proved unable to install using containers. It would not obey APP_URL properly and would mess up constantly HTTP / HTTPS redirection. Community was unrepsonsive and apparently github issues are ignore lately. So i ditched MonicaHQ and switched to BookStack: installed in a breeze (again container) and a very simple NGINX setup just worked. I will be testing it out now.
Would Obsidian work for you? The notes are stored locally, and the software uses markup for formatting and stuff. You can get it synced to your phone with Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.
Not really, I am not looking to a note taking app but a diary kind of app, quite different use case. Similar, but different feature set.
I picked up obsidian because it is a perfect diary app w/ templates and daily notes built in. But it’s so damn customizable that my obsidian notebook has become an all consuming passion of knowledge base and personal project managment that requires me to be productive IRL to generate more content for me to catalogue. Really appeals to the data hoarder in me, been a game changer. Highly recommend. Perfect 5/7.
A note taking app can be turned into a diary app if you only create notes for each day.
Even better if you want to then expand a section of a diary entry without actually modifying it nor jumping between apps.
Obsidian can easily help you tag and link each note and theme/topic in each of them.
There are several plugins for creating daily notes which will be your diary entries.
Also it’s local only, you can pair it with any sync service, the obsidian provided one, git, any cloud storage, or ones which work directly with the files like syncthing.
Just curious, what are the special features you expect from a diary service/app which a note taking one doesn’t have?
Obsidian can be almost anything you want it to be. Try searching out some videos from folks who use Obsidian for journalling.
Joplin
Like a blog?
Check out Wordpress, Hugo or Ghost.
If it isn’t meant for others to see, what’s wrong with a .txt file you just add notes to?
Seems like Monica or BookStack would fit your criteria. I looked into Monica for a similar reason but ultimately it seemed like too much work to organize every person in my life so meticulously. But if that’s what you want, it might be perfect for you.
