Sol Journal is a simple, minimal, journaling platform that works offline and across all devices. It can be hosted yourself on Firebase and then installed as a PWA, on mobile devices for easy access on a phone, or on Desktops.
Journaling is a keystone habit that can improve your happiness and overall health. Writing in a journal with pen and paper is effective, but not as easily accessible, maintained, or preserved as taking advantage of digital platforms.
Having a journal that is available on any device makes journaling easier. Being tailored specifically to journaling makes it less cumbersome than trying to utilize a note taking app or document for recording thoughts and impressions.
In the spirit of minimalism, a few key features are in place for a quick, lightweight journaling experience that can work across devices, including:
- 🔥 Authentication: Cloud firestore persists registered users to a users document and saved journal entries to an entries document
- 🎨 Theming: the
src/styles/theme.jsfile contains a set of colors and default styles that are applied to components with Emotion. A default light and dark theme are already in the file (adding theme-ui support would be a great future addition) - 🔍 Search: full-text search of a user's entries stored in Firestore for quick access to past entries
- 🖥 Mobile Friendly: designed to look great on mobile as well as desktop, with easy navigation on both
- 💡 PWA: being a progressive web app makes it installable from Chrome/Safari on desktop, or be added to the homescreen on iOS/Android
- 🔌 Offline Support: read/write when you're offline and let the updates happen when your connection is restored
- 🗄 Export: backup all of your entries at any time to save your data
Files are organized into these folders:
/components: user interface pieces to construct the design and layout of the site
/data: local data transformed by Gatsby to become queryable by Gatsby's GraphQL data layer
/img: images used by places like landing pages that are optimized by gatsby-image and then queryable in the GraphQL layer
/pages: public pages that can be seen by unauthenticated users and are completely server side rendered by Gatsby during gatsby build
/routes: private, client only routes only visible to authenticated users that are used by the app section of the journal
/styles: role based design tokens and theme definitions
/util: simple utility functions, for things like formatting dates
Sol Journal is inspired by JournalBook and borrows much of its design and navigation.
If you're interested in a comparable version of the project, you can check out this fork that adds rich text support to the journaling block.