Thi would be a breeze for Tinderbox. (www.eastgate.com)
It is mac only but it has all the functionality to maintain a weblog and a set of notes in the same file and give you total control over what is published and what isn’t.

Dave

A bit late to the discussion here, but I was thinking of doing an open source web app around this idea. A bit of searching and I stumbled across an iPhone app with many of the features you requested in addition to rave reviews. I don’t have an iPhone myself otherwise I would check it out:

http://www.momentoapp.com/

I have been using notepad on windows as a journal for many years. I use the logging function you mention in your next entry and it works well. I wish that function was available in every text editor on every Operating System.

I don’t worry about encryption because it is sitting on my own hard drive and that is already password protected.

@ Gjorgji:

Oh, hey – nice! I was searching for a private pastebin solution some time ago, and everything I found was either hosted, or required way to much effort. Not something I would be using for a journal though.

@ jambarama:

I thought about it, but meh… Tidlywiki worries me a bit because it is self contained. I’m not entirely sure I want my client to be intertwined with my data. Updates must be a bit dicey – especially if you have a lot of content in it.

@ IceBrain:

I always generate my own, unless it’s user facing solution. Then I’ll shell out a few bucks for a certificate from like Godaddy or somewhere.

Funny thing: every place I have ever worked had some sort of service hosted by a third party, which used a self signed certificate. Usually a web mail server, admin panel for something or whatever. It drives me crazy.

If our app has like 3 tech-savvy users, then fine – self signed works great. But if you have anywhere between 30 and 300 daily users, most of whom are complete idiots then you need a valid certificate. :)

@ Chris Wellons:

Yep, same problem as vim. Though I’m slowly giving up on all these requirements….

@ Tino:

Well, this is actually one of my top options. Here is a scary bit – I think I will need to color-code the admin UI on one of the blogs, to avoid posting personal entries to the public blog and vice-versa. :P

@ Scott Hansen:

Ooh! Interesting. I shall investigate this.

@ Ron:

Oh shit, nice. This might actually be worth while. :)

@ Daniel:

Holly crap! This is really cool! I did’t think about using the phone as a server, but it totally makes sense. That’s actually fairly brilliant.

Not sure if this would work as a journal, but I totally want to run a simple web-server off my phone now. Knowing apple they probably banned http serving apps by now though.

@ Liudvikas:

LOL! But my dark secrets are probably fairly boring. I sort of promised myself I won’t be one of those bloggers who write 6k words entries about how their day was. But that’s probably the kind of stuff I would track in a personal journal. Boring stuff that my future self could potentially get a kick out of some years from now – stuff for reminiscing, and remembering the “good old days”. That’s how I’m looking at this – auxiliary memory / notes for a future version of me.

You should defenitly check out “Trunk Notes” from the app store. At first it sounds ridiculous to use the iPhone (in my case an iPad) as server, but hell it works great. Wiki with images, sound recording, lots of special commands (tags, tail, …) custom CSS, dropbox sync, encryption on iOS, editing in the desktop browser ( using the phone as server), or via file in the dropbox. I was even able to use the desktop decryption tool to incorporate git into the mix… ( for doing daily snapshots).

3.99$ are well spent, but if you are not sure, check out the developers blog, he highlights many of the advanced features…

Currently, I am moving all my sites to this tool – since pages are written in markdown (my old software had that as well) I only have to update image references…
http://appsonthemove.com/blog

@ Chris Wellons:
There is a mobile-org app for both android and ios, not sure how/if it handles encryption. It requires a webdav server too.

I got addicted to Vimwiki a few weeks ago. It has a built-in diary feature (ww) that automatically creates a new file for whatever date it currently is, edits that same file anytime you open it during that day, and automatically creates an index page with the entries. You can also set this to auto-generate html each time you save a page so you can put those ‘diary wiki’ files in a server directory for remote private viewing if desired. This is in addition to your ‘normal’ wiki or wikis.

I also setup a script to automatically add each entry to a git repo on my server and sync (push and pull) that git repo (via cron) to whatever other computer I have setup in the script (currently – laptop and a 2nd server). Since this is single user, there should never be a git merge issue, as I’m only going to be working from one machine at a time. It’s working awesomely so far!

#!/bin/sh
type -P keychain &>/dev/null || { echo "I require keychain but it's not installed. Aborting." >&2; exit 1; }
eval `keychain --noask --eval --agents ssh id_rsa` || exit 1
local="$HOME/.local/share/vimwiki"
ssh_name="homeserver"
h=`hostname`
if [ "$h" = "$ssh_name" ]; then
s=""
else
s="$ssh_name"":"
fi
remote="$s""/srv/git/vimwiki"
status=`ping -qc1 google.com 2> /dev/null`
if [ -n "$status" ]; then
cd "$local"
git add .
git commit -a -m 'Autocommit'
git pull
git push
else
exit 11 # I think this is the cron exit code to try again
fi


The only element I haven’t worked on yet is doing updates from my phone (android). I’m thinking a simple private web page on my server that just has a text box that will automatically generate the correct diary file name and put it where it’s supposed to go.

Scott

I don’t get the arguments against setting this up as a locked down wordpress instance. Sure, if you were setting it up from scratch, it may seem like much work. But you already have it up and running. Couldn’t you basically clone the blog, add a .htaccess file, and be done with it? And then you could use exactly the same tools you use to post on your blog, which you are already familiar with.

To quote the book Numerical Recipes: “While this may at first seem like swatting a fly with a golden brick, it turns out that when you already have the brick, and the fly is asleep right under it, all you have to do is let it fall!”

Have you considered sharing you dark secrets with the internet? We promise, we won’t tell.

I keep bringing up Emacs all the time, but that’s just because it’s usually a relevant response. :-)

Very similar to your vim suggestion, Emacs org-mode provides a massive amount of functionality, giving you all the organization and navigation you’ll ever need. And, like vim, Emacs has transparent encryption. Starting an encrypted org-mode journal is as simple as,

* Open Emacs
* Start a new file called my-journal.org.gpg

The first time you save it will prompt you (twice) for a symmetric passphrase to use for encryption. Then you just use that passphrase again later when opening it. For remote access: no need for Dropbox. All you need is an ssh server and you can use Emacs tramp to access/edit the file remotely as if it was a local file.

However it probably suffers from the same problems as your vim solution. I don’t know the state of Emacs on the iStuff. Also, encryption at the file level is at odds with versioning. If you wanted to check it into Git you’d really want the whole filesystem underneath encrypted, which isn’t so easy to make transparent (mount, edit, commit, unmount).