Log Your Daily Activities With 280daily

I’m always looking for simple ways to keep a log certain activities- my workouts, my side project progress, my lesson plans, or whatever else I may want to reference later. So far the most trustworthy has been my handy-dandy notebook (cue Doug- “Dear Journal…”), but I don’t always have that with me and well, my notebook is really, “a bunch of notebooks.” What I really want is an easily accessible, singular place to keep journal entries. Since reading the Quick Look we published here a while back, I’ve though 280daily might be just that.

From their website:

280daily is quite possibly the future of consistent journaling and the easiest way to create a searchable archive of your life.

Secure, completely private, encrypted and safe.

Unlike other blogging platforms, 280daily is private and secure, and forces you to keep it pithy. At most, you can have 280 characters, 1 photo, and 1 interesting link. You also only have 1 category, and your entry either is, or is not, in it. Let’s take a closer look.

Using 280daily

Signing up for 280daily, much like the entire 280daily user experience (UX), is dead simple. Give them an email address (which serves as your username), password, and timezone, and you’re done. Verify your email address and start writing!

I was surprised by how customizable the dashboard (or account overview) is. You can drag and drop each box to position them the way you’d like, and you can choose to show or hide boxes from the settings area. We’ll take a look at that in a bit, but first, and most importantly, how do we go about writing an entry?

Writing an Entry

Writing an entry is incredibly simple- just click “New 280 Entry” at the top and start writing. There is no title or rich text editor; just a textarea, single checkbox, and submit button. You’re entries are titled by date.

After you create an entry, you then have the option to add a photo to it. It seems the flash uploader they have doesn’t work in Chrome for Macs, but you can switch to a basic uploader to get the job done. While I would like to upload the photo at the same time I publish the entry, I appreciate the simplicity of creating a new entry. You’ll also see the reason they left it out likely has to do with mobile support.

If you want to add a link to your post, you can turn that option on in Settings->New Entry.

My favorite part about creating entries is how easy it is to go back and create one retroactively. Where with something like WordPress, you need to change the publish date, with 280daily, you can add “Yesterday’s” or “Last Week’s” right from the Overview page, and you can choose a specific date from the New 280 Entry page.

Viewing Entries

280daily also nicely allows you to view previous entries. As you can see from the screenshot below, not only can you view a list of your entries, you can sort them in several different ways, including longest to shortest and vise-versa. You can also choose to view your entries in a free form grid instead of a list.

Entries that you check off as “Day of note” (or whatever you change it to) will show up in a different color from normal, uncategorized entries.

When I say free form, I mean the boxes aren’t a set size. They grow with the content. This makes for an interesting looking grid!

Once the number of entries starts to grow, it would be pretty tough to quickly find what you’re looking for by traversing through a list. That’s where 280daily’s Search comes in.

Not only can you do a quick search from the Overview page, but you can go to the Search page for a more refined search; limit by words in or not in an entry, by date, by number of characters, and if you want to include entries you’ve only checked off (I’ve changed “Day of note” to “Worked Out” to show which days I actually made myself go to the gym). The results page looks like just the previous entries page, the only different being the list  of search criteria at the top.

Settings and Other Features

I really love the 280daily Settings panel. Instead of presenting you with a settings page, they present you with a list of things you might want to change and how to access them. Then, on the right hand side they have all of the settings. I think this is a really nice way to save the user some time they’d burn searching through the settings, and make use of the default Settings page. You also have pretty fine grain control of how the app works for you.

From settings you can:

• Change when you get reminders to write an entry (or turn them off completely)
• Choose where you want to be taken when you log in
• Change the font size, header style, and other design elements
• Enable new entry options (link, photo, etc)
• Change the checkbox from “Day of note” to whatever you want
• Change the Account Overview boxes

…and a lot more! It pretty obvious just how much effort and thought the developers put into the smaller details of this app. And on top of these settings, you also have the ability to export your entries.

There are currently three ways to export your entries, with a fourth on the way. You can choose from PDF, printing straight out (as opposed to a PDF), and exporting your posts as a CSV. It’s worth noting that with a PDF export, you’re presenting with a whole list of advanced options where you can choose the heading titles, which posts to includes, if you want to include photos, order of the posts, and more. The fourth option, coming soon, is as a book of your entries that’s mailed to you. This is incredibly interesting to me- I can’t wait to see how they implement it.

I would have expected another way to export that’s more import friendly- XML. There is no XML, Atom, or RSS feed to grab your posts. While I do understand that this is a private journal where subscription isn’t needed, it would be convenient for the user if he ever decides to make the posts public on a different platform, or a whole host of other reasons you might use an RSS feed.

The final feature of note is great mobile support. Go to 280daily.com on any smart phone or tablet and the app works perfectly. This is in part due to the flexible design. It might look a little janky to some (especially in grid view), but it makes for absolutely flawless multi-device support. Great job by the 280daily team.

Conclusion

280daily is a power-packed web app with a minimalist feel. In a world where everyone shares everything, it’s refreshing to see an app that’s geared towards being secure and private. Plus, the app uses https for everything, so your encrypted and safe right from the get-go. Aside from the some design aspects that people may not like (I happen to like the design a lot), the only hiccups I saw were the flash uploader and a missing feature in RSS export. With it’s mobile web support, 280daily is a true web app- accessible anywhere, on any platform. Great work to the 280daily team!