Dabble Me is a great web based free online journal service to keep a record of your daily activities. Simple to use yet incredibly useful, Dabble Me can act as your very own automatically maintained diary, where you can log your life’s everyday musings, activities, and much more. It is completely open source, and has been built as an alternative to OhLife, an extremely popular web based free online journal service that’s due to shut down in a few days (In fact, OhLife is the inspiration as well as the reason behind Dabble Me’s existence). It even includes specific options to import your OhLife entries to your account. Dabble Me basically works on the same principle as OhLife, and all you have to do to record your day’s diary entry is to reply to an email that it sends you. It also includes features like scheduled reminders, regular emails of your past diary entries, and things like that. Let’s find out in a bit more detail, past the break!
How To Use This Open Source Free Online Journal Alternative To OhLife?
Before getting started with Dabble Me, you’re required to create a standard free account with the service. Account creation is a fairly routine process, and all you need is an email address. Once sign up is done, you are immediately directed to your Dabble Me account. Here’s how the web UI looks like:
As illustrated above, Dabble Me sports an exceedingly simple web user interface. The clean and minimal UI just includes a header, having a couple of navigational options. Apart from that, the majority of the UI actually shows the written entries. The navigational sections are briefly mentioned below:
- All Entries: To view all of the journal entries logged by you, check this section.
- New Entry: Click this option to create a new daily entry.
- Import OhLife: Use this option to import your OhLife journal entries to your Dabble Me account (discussed later).
- Settings: Here you can specify options such as the reminder schedule (days of the week and time each day to send reminder emails), whether to send a past entry with the remind or not, and things like that.
- Logout: Seriously?
Anyway, now that the usual stuff is out of the way, it’s time to see how Dabble Me works. Here’s a detailed step by step tutorial that illustrates the same:
Step 1: Once you’ve logged into your free account, you can directly use the New Entry option to start composing your daily journal entry. The online editor is quite feature loaded, and offers rich text formatting features. You can also change the date for the journal entry. It even lets you add images to your entry. You can either add images from your computer, or import them from a multitude of online services such as Flickr, Twitter etc. Check out the screenshot below:
Step 2: Once you’ve typed in your journal entry, simply hit the Create Entry button at the bottom. That’s pretty much all you have to do! Your journal entry would be immediately created and presented to you in a beautifully rendered format (check the screenshot below). In addition to that, you can also use the direct email reply method to post journal entries. All you have to do is reply to the reminder email sent to you by Dabble Me, with the content of your journal entry. To view the unique email address at which you must send the journal entry (in case you can’t wait for the reminder email), head over to the settings section.
Importing Your OhLife Journal Entries To Dabble Me:
As mentioned in the beginning of the article, Dabble Me has been designed as a place where you can keep an online journal of your daily activities but more so, it’s intended to be an open source alternative for the soon to go out OhLife. But what about all of your journal entries that you already have at OhLife?
Thankfully, Dabble Me has you covered. Using the Import option, you can import all of your OhLife hosted journal entries (and photos), complete with dates and other information directly to your Dabble Me account. To do so, first you have to export all your OhLife hosted journal entries to a standard txt export file (more instructions about it on OhLife). After that, copy/paste the contents of the export file to the import text area on Dabble Me, and hit the Import Entries button. On the same page, you can upload the zipped archive of the exported OhLife photos to import them to your Dabble Me account as well. How cool is that?
Also See: 5 Free Online Diary Apps To Create Online Diary, Journals
Conclusion
Dabble Me is a really useful web based free online journal service to keep a record of your daily activities. Designed as a free and open source alternative to the hugely popular but soon to shut down OhLife, Dabble Me is simple, easy to use, and works just as fine as the service it’s inspired from. And features like automatic email reminders, direct reply entries, random journal entries in the inbox etc., it’s even better. If you’ve been a long time user of OhLife and are searching for a viable alternative to jot down your daily activities, Dabble Me might just be what you need. Do give it a try, and let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
