building journl

Hey — I’m building journl.

I need something better than Notes, less “office” than Docs, and more expressive and chronological than WordPress or (eurgh) Notion.

They all have their place, but when I want to write about something that takes time - a process - there isn’t really a good place for it.

A notepad comes closest.
But notepads get lost.
Equations get messy.
Nothing links together properly.

So this is me starting journl.

Did this picture work?

Looks like it.

Bold

Heading

Quotes

• bullet 1

• bullet ...

1. un

2. deux

3. trois

for i in cats:
    print (i)

okay, code blocks need some work.

Hi

Hello

Bonjour

hi

This is quite nice, I think.

It means I can be expressionate when I write - less constrained, more natural.

What actually matters in the tech stack?
And am I building things in the right order?

Current thoughts:

• Migrate the DB to somewhere

• Add in PDF exports

• Fix the LaTex stuff

• Fix annoying type issues with typescript

• Enforce that a whole thread has to be shared to share images / posts - for now.

• Allow direct links to posts in a thread.

• Add reader preview to journl writing view.

Not sure about the order yet.

.

.

è

Testing.

hope that worked.

that one too?

no. AWS permissions are playing up.

Access to fetch at 'https...' from origin 'https://journl.ink' has been blocked by CORS policy: Response to preflight request doesn't pass access control check: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource.

Running a little nicer on mobile now, but still needing to adjust the mobile editor. It may be reduced to image/camera uploaded and text field. UX for mobile it tricky, but I realised the other day (in my journal about moss) that images are important parts of a story, and I won't always be writing on a laptop.

The little circled plus icon is great on desktop, but kinda useless on mobile.

I need to figure out how to get the take an image icon in the keyboard on mobile

Hmm cursor is not given control after image upload.

After image upload; I think we need to focus on the next block, instead of the image.

I should now be able to snap to next line after upload.

Yep

And then, once I drop in an image, or upload one I should be able to click on the image to add a caption!

Alrighty, time to get some friends to test.

Data integrity, or what i really mean is privacy is becoming an interesting topic. Currently entries are stored as JSON in the DB. While not efficient, its easy to work with. However it's stored in plain text, so if anyone ever got into the server they could read all the entries. Which is not ideal.

There's not many ideal solutions here, while we can encrypt the content if the server is compromised it's not going to matter that much.

I need to think about this a little more.

Well, I am settling on encrypting the json blob.

This isn't a perfect solution, but it will protect your posts from my eyes, and in the event that someone gets admin authed, they still won't be able to see private posts and anyone with a backup won't be able to see them either.

Better than plain text, and not too disruptive to the code base.

Hello

Hello

Mobile is still a little janky

I think I need to float the insert button to be above the keyboard?

I like it, I would use that

Heading text

I’ve started working on a “discover” button. Basically click it and read a random public journl.

I think of it as peering into a little room shared by someone.

Journl isn’t going to have a search mechanic. If you want someone to read your journl, it should be personal, like sending a link to someone or sharing a process on a forum. Having a random person trawl through search results on journl just gives me the ick.