Journally

Restoring memories, one journal entry at a time :)

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Journally - A journal entry a day. All through text.

Welcome to Journally! Where we restore our memories one journal, one day at a time.

Inspiration and What it Does

With everyone returning to their busy lives of work, commuting, school, and other commitments, people need an opportunity to restore their peace of mind. Journalling has been shown to improve mental health and can help restore memories, so that you don't get too caught up in the minutiae of life and can instead appreciate the big picture. Journally encourages you to quickly and easily record a daily journal entry - it's all done through text!

Journally sends you a daily text message reminder and then you simply reply back with whatever you want to record about your day. Your journal entries are available to view through the Journally website later, for whenever you want to take a walk down memory lane.

Challenges and Major Accomplishments

This was the first full-stack project that either of us has completed, so there was definitely a lot of learning involved. In particular, integrating the many different servers was difficult -- Python Flask for sending and receiving text messages via the Twilio messaging API, a MySQL database, and the Node.js webserver. With so many complex parts, we were very proud of our ability to get it all running in under 24 hours! Moreover, we realized that this project was quite a bit for two people to complete. We weren't able to get everything to work perfectly, but at least we have a working product!

What we learned

It was our first time working with API routings in Node.js and interacting with databases, so we learned a lot from that! We also learned how to work with Twilio's API using Flask. We had lots of fun sending ourselves a ton of test SMS messages.

How we built it

  • Twilio to send our registered users daily messages to Journal!
  • Secure MySQL database to to store user registration info and their Journally entries
  • Flask to send SMS from a user database of phone numbers
  • Flask to receive SMS and store the user's Journallys into the database
  • Node.JS for server routings, user registration on site, and storing user data into the database
  • Express.js backend to host Journally

Next Steps:

  • allow simple markups like bolds in texts
  • allow user to rate their day on a scale
  • sort by scale feature
  • Feel free to contribute!! Let's Journally together

Check out our GitHub repo:

GitHub

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