I’ve tried too many note-taking and journaling apps like Notion, Obsidian, and Apple Notes

Obsidian was the best because it’s just a file editor, but it never stuck. I’d be use it seriously for like a month, then forget about it, come back, and want to overhaul my entire file structure. Too much control is too much distraction for me.

So obviously, I made my own app.

Each day has a log, todos, and upcoming special dates like birthdays. Todos I don’t finish roll over to the next day, so I’m forced to look at them every day I don’t complete them.

It runs on my VPS as a single binary, and I open it from my phone with Tailscale.

Not everything fits in a day, So I added notes for things like trips, books, people.

I can mention a note from anywhere by typing @. The note then shows everything that mentions it. My Japan trip note has its todos at the top, and everything I wrote about it in my journal at the bottom.

Writing is only half of a journal. I also want to scroll back and read through my weeks.

The feed shows my days, weeks and months in order, newest at the bottom, kind of like a chat. It opens on today and loads older months as I scroll up.

Now I can doomscroll my own life. I guess I need to add a feature to randomize the order of my previous entries so it’s more like a feed.

My favorite page in onlyme is the activity page. It’s like the GitHub contributions graph, but for my journal.

Each square is a day, and the more I write that day, the brighter the square.

You can see I stopped writing for a few weeks in March, and then basically the whole summer. Hopefully the gaps encourage me to write more.