I have been keeping a journal in a private ikiwiki instance for several years now. Basically, I set up an ikiwiki blog that generates a static website, served by Apache over localhost. Files are in markdown, and kept in git. I do searches via "git grep". The static site is for easier browsing.

I've added things like "topics" (sub-blogs based on links to a topic page) and "people" (ditto). A topic is a page and automatically shows (via ikiwiki inline) all the blog posts that link to the topic page. A person is also represented by a page, and similarly lists linking blog posts. Topics are usually using a meta link directive in ikiwiki, whereas people use a person/lastname.firstname link to achieve the same.

I wrote a little tool to make admining topic and person pages easier, and to easily add new blog posts and attach images or other files to the blog post. http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/jt/ has the code; I should probably write this up some day.

I've published some of my journal, related to one of my hobby projects. http://liw.fi/obnam/journal-dump/ if you're curious, though from server access logs I know nobody is.

I keep my journal private mostly so I can be more honest when I write. If I need to, I can be rude and impolite and use quite dirty language, which I wouldn't if I was writing in public. Also, some topics are private and nothing good will come from disclosing them.