Create and update your digital diary

One of the biggest weaknesses of blogging – the online equivalent of keeping a diary – is that it’s so public. Sure, you can lock down your blog, but unless you’re hosting it on your own local server, it can leak online despite your best efforts.

Lifeograph (http://lifeograph.sourceforge.net) is designed to provide you with a journal that’s offline and – through password-protected encryption – private. It’s clean and simple to use, but dig a little deeper into it and you can get even more from it than simple text-based scribbles.

First steps

Lifeograph is available in the official Ubuntu repos, but the version here is likely to be outdated – 18.04 carries version 1.4.2-1, for example. For this tutorial we added the Flatpak repository (https://flatpak.org/setup/Ubuntu), which gave us the latest version – 1.6.1 at the time of writing – through the Software Centre.

After installation, launch the program to find yourself at the main program screen, which going forward will provide you with a list of all recently opened diaries (yes, it’s possible to set up and run multiple diaries to keep various aspects of your life separate). The first time it appears, you’ll see a handy ‘If this is your first time with the program, click here to start right away’ button to create your first diary file. Choose a suitable location on your hard drive and provide your choice of filename (with .diary extension) before clicking Save.

First, encrypt your diary for greater