PigeonPost

I'm a journaler. I love journaling, and writing about my life and I have no clue what made me want to write things down when I was 7 years old but I have been writing, drawing, documenting my daily life in increasingly personal ways since then. There's been gaps sure, months I've gone without writing anything but I always do come back to it. I've tried so many different formats. The non-consistency used to bother me but since I realised how fun and how useful it was to write about my life like this and document my growth, I've convinced myself to do it in any way I can whenever I remember to, no pressure.

When I was a kid I'd buy those little diaries with a lock and write and draw the things around me. When I was teenager, I invented a script (that I have since forgotten the key of so those texts are forever lost to time) so that no one else could read them. The 100s of songs I've written since I was 12 were all personal and diary-esque. I tried my hand at little vlogs (so cringe) and later podcasts with my childhood best friend a personal youtube channel with short videos of 5 mins or so to capture my musings (def inspired by Vlogbrothers). I've started countless blogs, kept track of books I've read, built apps to keep track of movies I've watched, tried the one second a day videos for a few years and more I can't even recall.

I am unsure whether it's the thrill of creating for me or whether I'm doing it to give future me some seratonin (and perspective) when she does re-discover all this content. I guess we shall find out.

All that comes to what I wanted to write about today. I like my notebooks, I like my little analogue camera and pretty stationary and other things. But it's hard to deny that I write more the more frictionless the process is to me, and unfortunately that means writing on my phone. I've tried many apps as you may have correctly guessed but I absolutely hate the idea of apps shutting down or having my data or not being supported anymore or even worse, better apps coming out because I have been burned by all these things before. After this realization I started moving to more local or open-source software. It's insane to even think someone else could own all this data, so now most of it just sits in my desktop and hard drives. But there is also convenience and a balance of things. After all of my trials and tribulations as a professional (going on 18 years of experience) journaler/documentor, email has worked best for me.

It lets me type it out quickly on my phone, attach pictures, and although it is a google account, I make automatic local backups every year or so so that I can still own all my own data.

I wanted to make this experience a bit more fun, personable and feel more like scrapbooking and journaling so I had initially started out with email templates that render nicely in my inbox and then decided to build a little tool for myself that sits as an app on my phone and opens to a pretty distraction-free environment to write in. I slowly added more fun things like a stamp maker and more templates to document books and food and coffee's I've tried and it has now become a whole thing.

I have been an avid evangelist when it comes to journaling and in another attempt of that here's the tool for you, dear reader, to try your hand at it too.

Pigeon Post 🕊️