Ipsum is an experimental journaling application created by me with the goal of organizing and resurfacing the most important parts of our entries, in order to improve salience of those thoughts which we consider most relevant.
It works by introducing a few novel UX patterns to a traditional journaling experience. The first is a highlighting feature, which allows us to mark sections of entries to be labeled or revisited. Second is a method of labeling and relating highlighted text and concepts, such that we can index highlighted ideas based on the conceptual threads in our lives which they concern. Third and most crucially is a feed which resurfaces our highlights and threads based on our engagement, akin to a social media feed.
Once we enter the app, we’ll be editing a journal project. Projects are not autosaved and can be saved to the web or locally to our computer. If we save to the web, the file will be fully end-to-end password encrypted so only somebody with that password will be able to open the file should they get their hands on it.
In the journal view, the left side of the screen shows pages containing journal content, and the right side shows a feed of highlights and threads.
The first thing we will interact with is the daily journal. Daily journal pages have black headers and make space for thoughts, ideas, and feelings pertaining to a given day. Only today’s and yesterday’s daily journal entries are editable. Entries prior to that become locked, but can still be highlighted.
At some point, we will feel compelled to highlight something we’ve written. We can do this by selecting text in the entry and clicking the create highlight button. This will open a highlight page.
Once we’ve created a highlight, it will show up in the feed. If on any given day we find the highlight to be relevant, we can click the engagement button, which promotes it the feed. The feed sorts results by a relevance algorithm by default, but can sort in other ways as well as filter results.
We should relate highlights to threads. Threads are concepts which exist in our life over time. When we write in Ipsum, we write about threads, and by relating highlights to threads, we can easily organize which highlights are about any given thread. For example, I might write a highlight which is a goal and which relates to meditation. By creating these relations, this highlight will now be discoverable with all other goals and with all other highlights about meditation. You can create relations to threads using the + relation button on highlight pages and choosing the relation predicate (is a/relates to) and typing in the thread name to create a new thread or find an existing one.
Threads themselves have pages and entries, similarly to daily journal pages. Unlike the daily journal, thread entries don’t reset every day, and changes to threads are persisted so that you can see a thread’s entry on any day which it was changed. We can think of thread entries as our thoughts about that thread. For example, my thread about meditation might include a description of what meditation means to me, a description of my meditation practice, and any other thoughts that represent my relationship with meditation.
After writing in the daily journal, creating highlights, and relating those highlights to threads, we’ve started a process which, starting tomorrow, will resurface our ideas and give us the opportunity to develop, elaborate, or reconsider them. Ipsum can help us build internal narrative and understand how we change over time.