Improving My Journal

21 Mar 2025 | ~2 minute read

Back in August I created a very simple Journal for my own use. I've been updating it lately and I think it's a lot better now.

So previously, my journal created simple plaintext files, then rendered them when a corresponding link was clicked. It was stupidly simply; here's what it looked like:

It has been working fine, but over time there's been some limitations that have started to frustrate me. The main one was that there was no simple way to browse my journal entries chronologically; I could only look at them one at a time, which is pretty shit.

I also decided that it would be cool to add a tagging system to entries, as well as a way for recording my mood at the time the entry was written. Unfortunately, this wasn't practical to do with simple plaintext files, so I decided to do things differently.

SQLite

My journal is now running on a new site that's pretty much the same on the front-end, except for the fact that it has a chronological list of my journal entries in all their glory (they are paginated 10/page). But at the back-end everything is stored in an SQLite database.

This has allowed me to add both the current mood option, as well as the tagging system. It all works really well. Better yet, because it's SQLite, there's no setup needed. The journal will detect if a database exists, and if one doesn't, it will create one when you save the first entry.

I'm really happy with how it turned out, and honestly, quite proud of myself. The code itself is a bit of a mess, which I'll likely clean up at some point. In the meantime here's what the new version of my journal looks like:

I've updated my journal demo site with the new code, so you can try if yourself if you like, or you can go straight to GitHub and laugh at my spaghetti code.

• Technology
• Web

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