Journals
Introduction
Monica, as stated in our introduction page, is about documenting your life. It lets you document your contacts, but it should also let you document what you do with your life. Journals let you do that.
In Monica, a journal is a personal diary that you can use to document anything you wish. We understand that journals are deeply personal, and that’s why we’ve designed a flexible structure that allows you to format your journal in any way you choose. Whether you prefer to document your life through daily entries, or use a structured format like a travel journal with entries for each day, Monica can accommodate your needs.
Additionally, you can create predefined content for each entry, giving you even more control over the structure and content of your journal. With Monica, the possibilities are endless, and you are only limited by your imagination.
Differences with other diary apps
We believe Monica is in a unique position to offer something drastically different from any other diary applications out there. Monica is a tool to document your life, including your contacts. We offer some great tool to let you write down what you do with your contacts.
Now imagine an application where you can mix your contact's data with a journal. Every post you write can be linked to a contact. Every activity you do can be linked to a journal entry.
With Monica, you can have an extremely tight integration with all your contacts. No other apps can do that.
Posts, templates and sections
To understand all the possibilities of the journal in Monica, you have to understand its structure, as it's a tiny bit complex.
A journal has posts. A post is the core of your journal, obviously. This is where you write things down.
A post follows a template. A template represents the structure of a post.
Your Monica account comes with a default template, that you can't modify or delete. The default template is composed of a title, and the body of the post.
However, you can create other templates that have a different structure. Imagine you want to document a road trip. Or you want to ask yourself a set of questions every day: for instance, how did you feel today, or what are the five positive things that you've done today.
Templates allow you to do that. In each template, you can add sections. A section is one part of a post, and will have a name that you will see when you create the post.
For instance, if you want to document a trip, you can have a template called Trip which will have the following sections:
New food you've eaten today
Things you've done
People you've meet
If you want to follow a positive mindset and use the journal to help you be more positive, you could have a template called Positive attitude with the following sections:
What will I do today to make it great?
3 things I'm grateful for
etc...
This makes it a very flexible structure that let you have the kind of posts that you want, and make your journal unique to you and your needs.
Managing journals
Creating a journal
A vault can have as many journals as you want.
To create a journal, head over the vault, and click on the Journals link in the menu.
A journal can be read by anyone who has access to the vault. However, only contributors and administrators of the vault can manage the journal or the posts.
To create a vault, you need:
a name,
and optional description.
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Customizing posts
As explained above, posts are not limited to a single structure. You can customize the structure at will, and define a structure per post. This is what we call post templates.
Monica comes by default with a template that you can't delete or modify. This is the base template, which contains a text area, and that's it. This is a post in its most basic form.
It also comes with another type of inspirational template. This one can be modified or even deleted if you want.
However, you can create other post templates, and make them as complex as you want them to be, matching your needs.
Creating a post template
To create a post template, head over to the Settings / Personalize your account / Post templates section.
Click on the Add a post template above and give the template a name.
Managing post templates
Once the template has been created, you can edit it to manage post sections. A post section is simply a part of the post. You can have as many sections in a post as needed.
A post template needs at least one post section. If a post has no section, there will be simply no place for you to enter any text, therefore defeating the purpose.
To prevent that from ever happening, a post template comes with one post section that you can't delete.
Each post section can have a label. Those labels will be displayed when you create a post. However, if a post template has only one section, the label won't be displayed.
You can reposition sections by drag and dropping each section inside a template.
Deleting a post template
You can choose to delete a post template any time you want.
It's important to understand that deleting a post template won't delete all the posts that match this template. Once a post is created with a template, it will keep this template forever – even if the template is deleted. This is to make sure that no content is ever deleted from your posts.
To delete a post template, head over to the Settings / Personalize your account / Post templates section, and click on the Delete button next to a post template.
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