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Product Guide

Managing Journals

Journals allow you to organise your entries and control who can see and edit them.

Journals provide the main organisational block within Flojourn. They are what appears in the NavList and they are where all the entries (the data) are held.

Private, Public and Request Journals

When you create a journal you have to decide if it is going to be public and visible to all users or private and only visible to you.

Public journals created by anyone can be found using the "Find Journals" item in the NavList. Anyone can click on a Public journal and view the entries within it.

Private journals do not appear in the search results of "Find Journals" and only the person who created them can see they even exist.

Request journals can be found like Public journals, but the entries in them can only be seen once the user has been given access, usually after they "request" access.

Access Permissions: Read, Comment, Write

When a journal is Public people can only read the contents. They cannot add entries or add replies. To get additional access a user needs to Follow the journal. The journal creator will set one of the following as the default access for followers:

  • Read - Followers get no additional access as they could read a public journal even before following it.
  • Read and Reply - This allows followers to add replies to entries in the journal.
  • Write - This allows followers to add new entries to the journal.

You can see a list of people following your journal and can assign access to them individually. Therefore for a public journal it would make sense not to make the default access "write". But on a Request journal "write" might be a useful default. Access can always be changed later.

The owner of a journal has a few more options when setting access:

  • Block - If a user is disruptive they can be set to block and they lose the ability to refollow the journal. If the journal is Public this does not stop them seeing the content. But on Private or Request journals they will not be able to see the contents.

  • Admin - You can give some users Admin status so that they can help set user access and also help with moderation.

  • Owner - Every journal has one owner. You can offer ownership to another user to transfer the journal to them.

Invites to Journals

An invite is a special weblink you can send to someone to invite them to your journal regardless of whether it is Private, Public or Request. When they click on the link it makes them a follower of the journal with the default journal access.

This is how you can get other people to see and contribute to Private and Request journals and it is a handy way to help people follow your journal without them having to do the manual following steps.

Invite links need to be sent to people via email or some other form of messaging outside of Flojourn. Invite links can also be displayed or downloaded as QR codes. This allows people to scan the invite with their phone camera to accept the invite.

Since an invite automatically follows the journal, if someone decides they do not want to follow the journal they can simply click the unfollow button.

Invites can be made for single use which is ideal for sending to an individual. Once used the single use invite expires and cannot be user a second time. There are also group invites which can be used any number of times. This would be useful when including a journal invite in an email to a group of people you know and would like to follow your journal.

Invites are listed to the journal owner in the journal admin page. This is where invites are created and copied. They can also be deleted to prevent their use.

Journals in the NavList

The NavList is the left hand sidebar on the desktop view or the main menu on the mobile view of Flojourn. At the top of the NavList there are a few standard control items, but then remainder of the NavList are journals that you have created or followed.

Clicking on a Journal name in the NavList shows the entries of the journal in the main content section.

You can add folders to the NavList to organise journals. You can also rename journals in the NavList without changing their public name which is useful if you follow two or more journals that originally had the same name. You can also set colours to the journal names to help quickly identify them in the list.