Daily Photo Journal
Ask it a question each evening, and a year later it hands you a book.
What you're making
Every evening a bot messages you one small question — what made you laugh, what's annoying you, what you ate. You reply in a sentence, maybe with a photo. It takes ten seconds. After a year you have a genuine diary you'd never have kept otherwise, and it can print the whole thing back as one long page.
A chat bot that prompts daily, stores short answers with optional images, and can render the archive back as a readable journal. The design challenge is a prompt that stays interesting for a year rather than becoming wallpaper.
Hosting · Free tier, metered
Deploys free on Cloudflare Workers, Fly.io or Railway.
A personal bot sits well inside free tiers, but it does need somewhere always-on to receive events.
Invite it to a server; free hosting tiers cover a personal bot.
Core features · 7
- Messages you one question at a set time daily
- Accepts a short text reply and optional images
- Questions vary so the prompt doesn't go stale
- Stores entries with dates and any attachments
- Renders the archive back as a readable journal
- Handles a missed day without guilt or nagging
- Exports everything so your diary is never trapped
The interesting part
- Keeping prompts fresh over hundreds of days
- Storing images somewhere free and durable
- Handling timezones so the evening prompt lands in the right evening
Once it works
- Add an on-this-day flashback
- Add mood tagging and a yearly chart
- Add a private mode requiring a passphrase to read back