Building My Journal — A New Way to Record My Thoughts

I've put in so much work over the last few days making the website better, cleaner, more efficient, and easier to use. But today I had a new idea — I wanted to put a journal on my website. Not a long, elaborate journal where I spend hours typing, but something I could dip in and out of throughout the day.

Maybe a quick entry when I first wake up, another one later in the day, one just before bed — or sometimes nothing at all. The idea was to be able to do it wherever I am: waiting for a bus, in a supermarket queue, sitting in the garden, or in the park. Whatever device I have on me at the time — laptop, iPad, or phone.

The problem is, I can't really type on a phone. My thumbs just aren't built for it. And typing on a laptop, while easier, is still very time-consuming. So I thought: I need to find a way around this. The obvious solution was to record what I want to say directly into the journal — wherever I am — and have it saved and uploaded automatically.

I figured out how to do that, though it took ages. The tricky part was that I didn't want to do it from the back end of the website — I wanted to be able to go to JasonNewland.com, click on Journal, and just record. No fussing around. I also wanted the journal to match the design and colour scheme of the rest of the site, which meant a lot of back-and-forth with the code before I got it right.

Once I had the recording and uploading working, the next problem was the quality of the text. It typed exactly the way I speak — and when you see that written down, it's a bit of a surprise. Repeated words, stuttering, mumbling, no full stops, no commas, no paragraphs. Just one enormous block of text. I'm not an orator, and I'm certainly not an English literature scholar, so editing it by hand would take a while.

I also realised that if I recorded something on my phone while I was out, I'd have to wait until I got home to edit it — and that completely defeats the purpose. So I spent most of today working on an automatic editing solution that works directly from the website itself.

I added buttons on the front page — one to add an entry, one to edit — so I can do everything from there. They're visible to visitors, but they won't work for anyone other than me. It took a lot of attempts. I kept trying, it didn't work. Tried again, still didn't work. And even about five minutes ago, I thought it was finally sorted — and then I accidentally deleted a journal entry I'd just recorded and edited.

But the editing itself seems to be working well. The formatting — full stops, paragraphs, all of that — is probably better than I'd manage myself. So progress is being made, even if it's two steps forward and one step back.