There are many ways of keeping a journal and it’s important to find a method that suits you. You can use the trusty pen and paper – a diary or loose-leaf folder for notes (hand-written or from a word processor). You can keep an electronic diary or use a note-taking system such as One-Note.

Or you can blog!

OK, there’s maybe a bit of bias here, but you are encouraged to think about it. There are advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it brings a degree of interactivity with others which can help in the ‘thought-sorting’ process. On the minus side, you need to have web access.

Not everyone likes the idea of their thoughts being exposed to the world, but Eutychus has some privacy options which allow you to restrict your blog to yourself, to named users or to the community. Individual posts may also be password protected.

Your data is backed up regularly – the entire website is backed up on a weekly basis and you have the option of exporting the contents of your blog at any time using the blog control panel.

With Eutychus, you can theme your blog, customise sidebar widgets, upload photos and files, create special interest groups, hold discussions on the forum and much more, so even if you don’t want to use Eutychus for journalling, it’s a great place to exchange ideas and to support others.

Journalling by blogging is not for everyone and this isn’t a hard-sell to get you to do it, but if you like the idea of it, sign up and give the features a run-through. Even if you blog elsewhere you are encouraged to set up a page here with a link to your own blog. You can display the RSS feeds from it as well.

If you are a candidate, you are encouraged to sign up and start your own blog. If you’re familiar with WordPress you should find yourself right at home. If you’re more used to other blogging platforms then take the time to experiment and get to know the features available here. There’s a huge selection of themes to choose from but if there’s something you really must have, get in touch (via the messaging system) and we’ll see what can be done.

You’ll also notice a few non-standard blogging features. The site supports some typical social-networking site facilities such as groups, friends, forums, private messaging and the like. Again, feel free to explore and get to know the features.

The blogs support some useful widgets to link to flickr, twitter and the like. If there are other ways we can integrate sources of information, please let us know and, if they can be added, they will.

You should have gathered by now that the site offers a lot of features, has a lot of flexibility and, more importantly, not being linked to a proprietary system like Facebook, can be tweaked and adjusted to suit the needs of the community.

Go, explore and then let us know what we can do to make this a site best suited to your needs.