Using Personal Knowbase for Journaling

Personal Knowbase is great for keeping a diary or journal.

The software stores free-format information divided into separate notes, called "articles." You can effectively use it as a diary by creating a new article entry for each date. You can sort articles by date for chronological entries, as for a daily diary or a personal journal with irregularly-added entries.

Tagging each article with "keywords" provides a natural way to assign topics or themes to each entry so that you can later easily find related entries. With keywords, you can find all entries related to a selected event, person, action, or subject.

You can also search for articles using text strings or by date ranges.

Types of journals that Personal Knowbase has been used for include:

• A general-purpose journal of personal entries.

• A writer's journal for recording ideas, sources, and writing snippets.

• A professional journal for recording daily business events, decisions, and actions.

• A dream journal for recording and tracking dreams.

• A medical journal for tracking medications, symptoms, activities, and food intake.

• A fitness journal for tracking exercise and calories.

• A naturalist journal for tracking daily or seasonal changes in natural phenomena.

Password Protection

Personal Knowbase includes a password protection feature to keep your personal information private. You can password-protect an entire file or just selected articles within a file. For most journals, you want to use the option to password-protect the entire file.

PK's Help system has details for Password-Protecting a Data File.

Not Updating Dates

The Personal Knowbase software has a setting to update an article's date every time you edit the article in any way, including changing content, keywords, or attachments. This setting is set at the File Properties level, so that you can set different PK data files to update or not update dates as appropriate. By default, this setting is turned off.

A diary or journal data file is a good example of a file for which you do not want to automatically update article dates. You probably want to set the article date to the date of the journal entry and not update the date if you later tweak a typo or change a keyword.

If you need to turn off automatic date updating for your journal file, see the Help system's procedure for changing the date-updating setting.

Visual Content with Attachments

Personal Knowbase can only store text information directly in its articles. However, if you want to connect visual information, such as images or videos, to your journal entries, you can link to external files using the article attachments feature. You can display thumbnails of your images along the bottom of the article content using the Image Gallery feature.

My Journals

I have a separate, new Knowbase data file for each type of journal I keep. I have one main one for my regular private, personal journal, which is a password-protected file. Other journals and diaries I have kept in Personal Knowbase over the years include a naturalist diary tracking a robin's nest in our front yard (see the screen shot above), a medical diary for a sick dog, and, for a while, a dream journal.

What kind of daily or regular information could Personal Knowbase help you track?