Home Journal

A self-hosted mini journaling site for families for capturing

• memories
• stories
• photos
• ideas
• jokes
• and anything else you want to remember

I had an old wordpress blog that I converted to markdown files and needed a way to view the posts. I was looking for something self-hosted and simple. Some of my design requirements were:

• Mobile friendly and easy to post from mobile
• Need to look and feel like a mobile app
• Needed to be all static files, or as close as I could get
• Needed to be markdown based
• Needed to have a sane directory structure
• No authentication or social auth since this is self-hosted
• No database
• No javascript frameworks
• Minimal dependencies
• No need to edit posts from the UI
• No need to delete posts from the UI
• Ability to regenerate all html files
• Ability to add new posts with a text editor

What's working

• Index page
• Post page
• New post page
• Tags page
• Progressive web app (PWA) support (requires https)
• PWA as share target
• Responsive design
• Rebuild static html files (http://your.server/all)
• Static files for all but new entry submission
• Github style markdown formatting

Future enhancements

• Support for videos and other file types

Installation

• Clone the repo
• Copy the sample_site directory to your desired location, it will be the directory for all content
• Build and source a virtual environment
• Install from the source directory pip install .
• Run the server `home-journal -sd /your/site/root --tags cars,people,boats,nature
• Enjoy (http://your.server:8000)

Thank you

• Slick modern simple CSS https://www.beercss.com/
• Markdown to HTML, github style https://github.com/theacodes/cmarkgfm
• Github style markdown/html CSS https://github.com/sindresorhus/github-markdown-css
• Handy frontmatter extractor https://github.com/eyeseast/python-frontmatter
• Easy wordpress xml to md https://github.com/lonekorean/wordpress-export-to-markdown
• Sample photos https://unsplash.com/