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OhLife: A Personal Journal You Might Actually Keep Updating

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92 pointshooande61 comments

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I would feel uncomfortable mailing my most personal thoughts to a server I don't control, or even using clear text email at all for that purpose.

What is the alternative apart from paper journals?

/curious

Store it locally on your computer? (being careful to back it up of course)

Yeah, when reading this, between the fact that I love emacs and the fact that I'm not too comfortable giving Ohlife (and Google, since I use Gmail) my journal, my immediate thought was text/markdown files backed up to a private Github repo.

But the email would remind me to do it every day, and it'll be easier to look through old entries on Oh Life since it shows all entires on one page (though I guess there's nothing stopping me from just having one super-long text file, if that's what I want).

At least they have an export that looks solid.

Yes, I use Aquamacs to edit a super long text file that I keep on an encrypted volume. I don't worry about reminding myself. I do it when I feel like it, which turns out to be 2-3 times per week.

Perhaps an open-source version?

I know quite a few people use their iPhones/iPads for such writing.

I really like http://750words.com

Yeah, if my day consisted mostly of addressing personal 'issues' (for lack of better word) that I don't want posted to a remote server then I simply don't write about that day. And I wouldn't write about it even if it was being saved only on my own disk.

I find journaling about 'personal issues' is where it's most useful. It helps bring clarity to a subject inherently clouded by emotion.

I'm going to use it for a little while, and if it seems like something I'm going to continue doing I'll set up a similar script to email me reminders every day and have the reply I send to myself auto-sorted into some mailbox where it can gather dust until I decide to read it again.

Assuming you've gmailed personal messages (and therefore trust google enough), you could set up google calendar to email you daily.

Of course without the random previous entry. Maybe with google documents there's a way to do that too.

EDIT google word doesn't have scripting, but their spreadsheet does. Their automated forms is a tiny bit like what's needed [you can enter info & it's stored], but it's not emailed, and can't be configured with a random entry. Now that I think about it, MS Word disabled automated emails (due to spammers using it), so maybe google has too. But there seems no harm in allowing it to only the one verified & linked gmail address for the account. (Otherwise there may be a niche here).

Checking google spreadsheets, and you can email from it. Just tested, it works. There's a time-based "trigger". You should be able to email a form, in a htmlBody, and store the results so you can include a previous entry.

The scripting tool and documentation are excellent.

Got the basics working.

Made a spreadsheet. Made a google form ("how has your day been?" + a text area) - they automatically add their fields to the spreadsheet. Wrote a short script that selects a random row at random, and emails it to me + a link to the form. Added a trigger that runs that script at 8pm-9pm daily. [if anyone wants the script, I'll post it - please improve it!]

Some flaws: 1. I couldn't work out how to automatically embed a form in the email directly, neither using their embed code (an <iframe>) - it works if they email it to you (which you need to trigger manually), but also gives a warning "you are leaving this page"; 2. also couldn't work out how to initialize the form with the random previous entry (a blog post said you could, but that was in 2008) nor 2. writing my own form (need an URL for the action: seems you need a form key, which you can't get, for security reasons(?))

Boy browser programming sure is frustrating: browser locked up twice had to set it all up again; 7 sec load time for pages; weird cursor movement for editing (and also not vim); along with the above limitation. Though it probably doesn't help that I don't know what I'm doing :-)

I'd like to see the script; I take it that it's some sort of Perl thingy which goes through the Google spreadsheet API? Or does the spreadsheet have builtin scripting?

It's built-in; it's Javascript. In the spreadsheet, the script stuff is in the "tools" menu, and it opens a new window which has a menu for "triggers". The help is pretty excellent (reference and tutorials), but it doesn't cover Javascript's standard libraries, only google's special spreadsheet classes (BTW: there's some cool stuff in there for webserves, you can download URLs and parse XML.)

  function sendEmail() {
    var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
    var numRows = sheet.getLastRow() -1;// don't count first row
    var selectedRow = Math.floor(Math.random() * numRows);
    var dataRange = sheet.getRange(selectedRow+2, 1, 1, 2);// from A2, 1 row, 2 cols
    var values = dataRange.getValues();
    var date = values[0][0];       // 1st row, 1st col
    var prev = values[0][1];       // 1st row, 2nd col

    var message = "<HTML><BODY>"
      + '<a href="'+yourFormURLhere+'">goto form</a>'
      + '<BR>'   
      + '<b>Oh snap! Remember this from '+date+'</b>'
      + '<BR>'   
      + '<textarea rows="20" cols="60" name="prev">'
      + prev
      + '</textarea>'
      + '<font size=1>RemainingDailyQuota: '+ MailApp.getRemainingDailyQuota() +'<font>'
      + "</HTML></BODY>"
    ;

    MailApp.sendEmail( yourAddressHere, "How did your day go?",
      "", {htmlBody: message});
  }

You get the yourFormURLhere from the form editor. The daily quota is 500 emails.

Protip: It turns out 8pm is not a good time for the trigger to send it, for you to record the day's events, if you keep odd hours like me and get up at 9pm sometimes...

EDIT the http://OhLife.com selection of the previous entry is more useful: they first choose whether it will be "one month ago" or "one week ago" etc, then work out that date, and then get the entry from that date (or I guess the next one if blank). It might turn out that for a particular person that always being reminded of "this time last week" is a very effective context (or some mix of them). Bonus: it's trivial to then describe the entry with that string, which is much more natural than some timedate format.

If someone set up a similar service using a Tahoe LAFS storage server or some similar technology so that the service provider could not read your entries, would you use it?

The design for this website is one the things that consistently gets me. It's so simple and gorgeous.

Dustin Curtis, in a tweet, also agrees: "This is absolutely awesome: http://ohlife.com Very well designed and very simple."

Who is Dustin Curtis?

http://screenshots.dustincurtis.com/Quora_%2813%29_-_Who_is_...

Random fact. All of these "Some say..." references are made in a car show called "Top Gear" [1] about their incognito test driver, "The Stig." [2]

[1] http://www.topgear.com/uk/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stig

I lasted 1 day before I stopped updating it. This is an interesting spin on keeping a diary, but the fact that I was storing it someplace without a privacy policy that I didn't implicitly trust made me walk away instantly.

The emails asking you to update don't mention anything about privacy either. Throughout the whole sign up process I wasn't given a solid indication that my posts would be private.

Its different than a private LiveJournal or something like that because you feel like LJ gets enough money/advertising/traffic from the community and the users that they don't even care on the content.

Writing down my personal thoughts in a place where only "private" personal thoughts are stored in the cloud is very counter-intuitive. The selling point is "you'll actually do it because I'll send you a dynamic email" and the incredibly styled web interface.

But after they get 1,000,000 free users - how are they going to make money? The only thing they have that someone without a web-app does is a bunch of personal information and thoughts.

Just seems weird to me. Cool concept though.

I've been using OhLife for some time now and really like it. Since the sign-up I never visited the webpage, all my interaction with the service is done through the email. This is absolutely brilliant. Every day, before I go to sleep, I reply to the "how did your day go" email, looking back at the day. It also improved my writting. Great work guys!

>It also improved my writting.

Sadly not the spelling.

Great idea guys - I bet this could be really big.

I like private by default, but an option to make your stream public (or share with family) could help. I'm sure you've thought of this though.

No idea how you'll monetize it, but I bet you'll get a nice base hit out of this. Whoever is doing your design kicks ass. Congrats!

Oh one more thing I forgot to mention: have you guys split tested putting the signup fields (email, password, timezone) RIGHT on the homepage instead of behind a click? My gut says you'll get a better conversion rate with that (big green sign up buttons are scary) but you never know.

Maybe even reducing it to a single email field on the homepage and putting the password + timezone after clicking a confirmation link in the email.

Seems like there are some interesting monetization strategies. Collect my entries for a year and then offer to sell me a stunningly-bound printed collection of my last year's entries, perhaps interspersed with news snippets relating to specific entries etc. Or let me select a particular range of entries talking about the start of my new relationship and have them bound and printed as an anniversary gift for my loved one a few years down the line.

I guess online sharing in a kind of mini-blog format for a few trusted people is also an interesting premium service.

There must be dozens more of these...

It's a nice idea, except that you're placing an enormous amount of trust in the web site owners not to leak/sell your private commentary to all and sundry. The potential for blackmail with something like this could be huge. Also, if you're living under a not so friendly regime web sites like these can be obligated by diktat to hand over your information upon request. Imagine, if you will, a modern version of Anne Frank.

This was announced on HN a couple weeks ago - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549115

This is a cool idea. I started one page per day http://www.onepageperday.com and have been amazed at how many writers choose to simply keep a diary (some are quite fascinating). Check 'em out under the glimpses section :)

Nice! The first thing I thought of is sharing it with my girlfriend. But she doesn't have a Google or Twitter account. Can you add Facebook connect? I reckon you might get a whole lot of new users.

Yeah I need to do that. I'll probably do so in the next week or so.

The use of text-shadow is really annoying, please stop doing that. It make the page look as if it is displayed on an uncalibrated monitor.

I think it depends on what monitor you're looking at it on :) I think it should probably go too.

I've been doing something like this with shellscripts for a long time. The shellscript opens up vim. It concats the file to one on the disk, adding a timestamp, and posts the entry to my gmail account. A gmail filter labels and archives the mail.

One can also create a private livejournal account and post to it using a command-line program such as ljcharm.py.

You can create a private blogspot blog and post to it from gmail itself. You can set a daily reminder for 8 pm in google calendar if you so wish.

I think it's a great idea, but before I would start using this, I'd like to at least try to understand your business model.

How is this supposed to make money?

I don't think it needs to make a whole lot of money. How much bandwidth and disk space could an email+plain-text-storage service possibly use up? With minimal ongoing costs, they could use strange or very inefficient business models.

A personal journal is a personal thing. If I record my thoughts in this for say 4 years straight and suddenly in the 5th year the company goes down, How do I recover my valuable memories? (Personal journals are more precious to me than photos)

There is an export facility (link on the "past" page) that you could use for backups.

This is pretty neat - exports as .txt files and even the filenames are named as "ohlife_20100818" (ohlife_YearMonthDay)

Thoughtfully designed.

I'd also point that this is email-based, so aren't you automatically saving a copy? You can just search on OhLife's email address to pull up everything you sent, and there are your valuable memories.

(You want them as a bunch of plain text files? Well, hopefully you are using a nice email provider who gives you POP or IMAP access, like Gmail. Download them, grep, and Bob's your uncle.)

I've been using this for about a week and a half. It works reasonably well. I usually see the 'What did you do today' mail only the next morning after I wake up, which is really, the best time to fill it out for me.

Is there any way to change the settings so that I get sent an email once every 2-3 days instead of daily? I don't fancy writing a daily journal, but a twice-a-week diary would be sweet.

You can ignore the emails (delete them perhaps)

Ohlife reminds me of a prettier, and less clever version of 100words. http://www.100words.com/

There's some really interesting creative work coming out of 100words based on folk's every day experiences. I'd recommend that HN folk check it out and that the OhLife founders take a particular look at it to see how they might attract and retain their own customers.

I just keep a personal Wordpress blog hosted on my computer, and keep a link to it in my home page HTML. I've found the scheme to work pretty well.

The part of the article relating to Y's previous projects and one dying out. Did Y do any post failure writeups on this? wondering what lessons they may have learned or tips they could give to others.

Well, I've turned back to the paper. I can write whenever I like and don't need to have the computer with me. (And I've been keeping a journal since 2006, writing almost every day.)

What are the possible ways a service like this can be monetized?

It's very pretty, but I can't really see how it's better than a Google Docs document.

The key is how it uses your email as it's interface. I tried it, and really liked how it worked. I'm not much into writing a journal so I'm not using it, but I could see that approach working for other ideas/sites.

You're correct that it's not really about the writing interface per se. I've been using OhLife for about two weeks now, and the fact that you get this daily email prompt to write is the key.

Surely it must be more than that, because you can just as easily add a daily task on Google calendar with an email (and SMS) reminder.

Certainly, but I don't see any automatic way way for a Google calendar reminder to automatically include a previous entry. That would need a Labs or something else more advanced.

The rest of these features are just frills, like replying to an email, or getting a previous random entry.

A simple shellscript does the main job. In fact, mine actually used to do a "tail" of the existing file before prompting me for a new entry, but i found that a bit annoying.

Are they frills? There is no before-after comparison, of course, but the articles does say:

> It sounds far too basic, but the OhLife team says that it works: they report that 50% of users who complete their first entry have continued to add an entry at least once every other day. It probably helps that, despite the spare feature set, the site is very nice to look at. At this point OhLife isn’t doing anything to monetize, but if it can get traction then the team will consider freemium options.

It is more than that. If you actually read the link for a few seconds, you'll see that one can simply reply to the nightly reminder it sends. Compare that to a Google reminder that would send you a link which you'd click, then log in, then open your Journal document, then scroll down, create a new heading, etc.

Yeah, that's exactly what I tried for a while. Daily Google email reminder asking something like "How do you feel today?" or "what did you learn today?" and I'd write a short quick reply to my private posterous. I think OhLife's idea of including an old post is very clever.

It's better in the same way Posterous is better then a normal Blog. Email is a great UI!

Agreed; Posterous differentiated themselves by executing on a common idea with a different philosophy. This seems to follow that trend. The idea itself is something for which there are many solutions, Docs included, but the philosophies behind it bring something new to the table.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com