It is difficult to find a good way of keeping a personal journal across different computers; or even to find software that keeps a journal nicely.  On Linux I’ve experimented with Redbook, and for years have also been using a plain text filing system that uses a regimented form of the file name to keep track.  However I’m thinking now that a better way may be to use WordPress for this purpose, as, irrespective of whether the journal is shared or private, the writing environment is now pleasant, clean and easy to use, and the journal is always available, whether the blog is shared or otherwise.

I was looking also at Vivaldi’s community.  They have also started to use WordPress for blogs, which seems sensible rather than diverting valuable time and attention to developing their own blogging platform.  I have to admit, I was tempted.  But I learned something from my previous experience with Opera (as well as with other platforms).  Opera created a really nice networked blogging system that was supposed to be bulletproof, or proof against ever removing it, since it was also the basis of a community around Opera itself.  However, eventually they scrapped it.  It was very unfortunate.  Vivaldi is a nice browser, but, like many small tech companies, it’s all dependent upon one man.  If were suddenly to sell out to a larger company, be killed in a car accident, or whatever, the future of Vivaldi would be questionable.  So it’s better to stay with a company like Automattic whose future is more secure.

Postach.io takes the post you put in a notebook on Evernote and serves it in a blog hosted on Amazon Web Services.  This technical stuff happens in the background so, from the user’s point of view, the result is a really simple way to blog, with the added security that every blog post is synchronized both on Evernote and on one’s home computer.

In addition, Evernote has just improved its security in order to allow third party authorization only for a single notebook, which means that using Postach.io with Evernote is also much more secure than in the past.

I used Postach.io for a short time, but stopped mainly due to Evernote’s poor integration with Linux.  Unlike, say, Dropbox, the only way to use Evernote offline on a Linux desktop is to rely on third party solutions that are much poorer than the native Evernote desktop interface.  So, in order to use Postach.io, it was necessary to write online – in which case I may as well use WordPress, or use one of these Evernote 3rd party options. In addition, post-Snowden, I started to think about privacy issues and stopped using Evernote for other kinds of notes.  Nowadays I simply use Emacs Org Mode for my notes.

Postach.io has also introduced blogging via email – just as many blogging platforms including WordPress do – but that doesn’t work for me as I always need to edit and re-edit whatever I write.

For someone who is not a Linux user and loves Evernote, Postach.io is a clever solution.

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