Hold Your Line

A user guide — take your time, it doesn't have to be in order.

What this is

Hold Your Line is a private place to put the events of a life in order: what happened, roughly when, with any letters, photos or reports that belong alongside. It was built for gathering the story behind an ill-health retirement, but it suits any situation where you need to lay out difficult events clearly — for a doctor, a solicitor, a tribunal, or just for yourself.

Two ideas run through the whole app. First, nothing has to be finished or exact — you can add things in any order, with half-remembered dates, and come back later. Second, it is genuinely private — everything you write is encrypted in your browser before it is stored, and only your passphrase can unlock it. Nobody else can read a word, including the person who runs the app.

Your account, and the two sets of words

You join by invite link, and your account name is your email address — that's what you type to sign in.

The invite link does one job: it sets up your account, once. After that you don't need it again — and if you open it later, it will tell you so and point you to sign in. To come back another day, go straight to the app's own address (the same one the invite link opened) and sign in with your account name and passphrase. It's worth saving that address — bookmark it, or add the app to your home screen (see below).

There are two sets of words, and it's worth being clear which is which, because they do different jobs:

• Your passphrase — five words. You choose this when you accept the invite: the app suggests five random words, or you can make up your own (ten characters or more). This is the one you type to sign in, and the one that unlocks everything you write. Five random words is deliberate — short passphrases can be guessed by anyone who gets hold of the stored files, and that would undo the whole point.
• Your recovery phrase — six words. The app gives you this, once, and offers an emergency kit PDF with it on. You never type it to sign in. It exists for one moment only: the day you can't remember your passphrase.

Print the kit or save it somewhere safe at home.

Forgotten your passphrase? On the sign-in screen choose “Forgotten your passphrase?”, type your six words, and you'll be walked into choosing a new one (which comes with a fresh emergency kit — the old one stops working).

The timeline

The Timeline page is home. Entries appear in date order, grouped by year, with a gentle note wherever years pass with nothing recorded. Use + New entry to add something — a title alone is enough to start.

Entries without a date yet sit in a “Not placed yet” box at the top, so nothing gets lost while you work out when it happened.

Above the entries you'll find:

• Search — type anything to filter entries.
• “come back to these” — shows only entries you've flagged as unfinished.
• oldest / newest first — flips the order.
• “hide all” — covers what every entry says at once, for a hard day (see below).
• Theme chips — one tap shows only entries with that tag.

On a phone, two floating buttons sit at the bottom right: 🍵 Take a break and 🔒 Lock. On a computer they live in the menu on the left.

Messages

Every so often a short message from John may appear at the top of your timeline — usually about planned maintenance, or a change to the app. Read it, then tap the ✕ to clear it; each one only shows once. These are just notes about the app itself: nobody can see what you've written, and a message never means anyone has read your timeline.

Covering what's hard to see

Some days, catching sight of what an entry says — even in passing on the timeline — is too much. You can cover it, and uncover it whenever you're ready. Nothing is deleted; it's only hidden from view.

• One entry: each card has a small hide button. It covers what that entry says; show brings it back.
• Everything at once: hide all, in the row above the entries, covers every entry together — a quiet timeline you can still read by title. show all uncovers them again.
• Titles too: normally the title stays visible so you can still find things. If even the titles are hard to see, turn on Settings → Hiding entries → “Also hide titles when hiding entries”. Then hiding leaves just the date — and you can still open an entry to read it whenever you choose.
• One title on its own: to keep a single entry's title hidden whatever that setting, open it and pick Cover whole entry under “In the timeline”.

Covering is only about the timeline view — a comfort, not a lock. Your Review & export document and your backups always hold everything, so nothing you cover is ever lost. And what you cover follows you: hide something on your phone and it's hidden on your computer too.

Writing an entry

The title: whatever you'd call it — plain words are fine.

When was it? Pick whichever matches how well you remember: Today, an exact date, a month and year, a year only, between two dates, or “Don't know yet”. A rough answer is a real answer — you can always sharpen it later.

Tags group entries into themes — “health”, “school”, “police”, anything you like. Type one and press Enter, or tap a quick-add suggestion. Tags power the theme filters and the grouped reading in Review.

What happened? Write as much or as little as you want. Plain writing is fine; if you want formatting, **bold**, *italic*, and lines starting with # (heading), - (list) or > (quote) all work — the Preview button shows how it will look. Your writing saves itself as you go.

Attachments: add photos or files (up to 4 MB each). Every file gets a reference number like A-003 that you can quote in your writing or in letters. Everything you attach is encrypted, like the rest.

“Come back to this” marks the entry unfinished so it's easy to find again — useful when remembering takes more than one sitting.

Deleted an entry by mistake? It waits in Settings → Recently deleted for 30 days before it's gone for good.

Reading and sharing it — Review & export

The Review page shows the whole timeline as one document, titled “Timeline of events” — read it through to spot gaps, or share it with a professional. Your name and NHS/National Insurance numbers appear at the top if you've added them in Settings.

You can filter it to particular themes, or switch to read theme-by-theme instead of one long chronology. Entries flagged “come back to this” are marked, so you can see what still needs attention before sharing.

Download PDF turns the document into a file you can email or print. Photos appear in the document itself, in place, so most of the time the PDF alone tells the whole story. If you'd rather keep it light, untick “Show photos in the document” and they'll be listed instead.

If your entries have attachments, the button says “Download PDF + files (one ZIP)”: you get a single ZIP with the PDF and an attachments folder holding every file. Each file is named by its A-number, and the document refers to each one by that same number — so you match a mention to its file by the number, not by clicking. (Files aren't clickable links on purpose: a PDF that tries to open a file on your computer makes many readers show an alarming security warning, which is the wrong look on a document going to an assessor.)

Print view opens the same document ready for printing.

Add an AI summary to the top is an optional tick box. With it on, a short overview is written and placed above your entries in the document. It's clearly labelled as machine-written, and your entries underneath are always the real record — read the summary over before you share it, because a computer can get the emphasis wrong.

This is the one thing that sends your writing outside the app. Everything else stays encrypted and unreadable to anyone but you. To write a summary, your entries have to be sent to Google's Gemini service. That's why it's switched off unless you turn it on, and why you need to add your own key in Settings first — until you do, the tick box stays greyed out and tells you so. If you'd rather nothing ever left your device, simply don't use it; everything else works exactly the same.

Backups — please do this

Download backup (on the Review page) saves everything — entries and attachments together — as one ZIP on your device. It's the only copy of your timeline that exists outside your account, and the app will gently remind you if it's been a while.

Restore backup puts a backup back. It's careful: entries merge rather than overwrite (newer edits win), and attachment files are only re-uploaded if they're actually missing. Restoring an old backup won't trample what you've written since.

Take a break

Writing about hard things is heavy work. The Take a break button (🍵) covers the screen with a short grounding exercise — five things you can see, four you can feel, three you can hear, two you can smell, one you can taste, then one long, slow breath.

Everything you've written is saved before you pause. Carry on when you're ready, or lock the app for the day.

Phones, laptops and being offline

Everything follows your account: sign in on a phone and a laptop and both see the same entries. Edits sync automatically; if you're offline, writing still works and syncs when the connection returns (attachments need a connection to upload). If two devices edited the same entry, the newer edit wins — nothing errors, nothing is lost silently.

Lock (🔒) signs you out on that device and removes your timeline from it — it stays safe in your space online.

Putting it on your home screen

Hold Your Line installs like a proper app — its own icon, full screen, no browser bar — straight from the website, with nothing to find in an app store:

• Android (Chrome): open the site, tap the ⋮ menu at the top right, then “Add to home screen” (on some phones it says “Install app”), and confirm.
• iPhone or iPad (Safari): open the site, tap the Share button (the square with an arrow), scroll down and choose “Add to Home Screen”, then Add.
• Computer (Chrome or Edge): look for the small install icon at the right-hand end of the address bar, or find “Install Hold Your Line” in the browser menu.

Installed or not, it's the same app with the same account — installing just makes it one tap from your home screen and a little quicker to open.

Settings, briefly

• Tags — add tags ahead of time, rename or remove one everywhere at once (renaming into an existing tag merges the two).
• Details for the export — your name and NHS / National Insurance numbers, shown only at the top of the exported document.
• Appearance and text size — light or dark, and three text sizes. The whole app uses a typeface designed for legibility (Atkinson Hyperlegible).
• Hiding entries — the “also hide titles” switch, for when even the titles are hard to see. The hide buttons themselves live on the timeline (see “Covering what's hard to see”).
• AI summary key — optional, and only needed if you want the AI summary on the export page. Paste in a free Google Gemini key (the page tells you where to make one). It's kept on the device you enter it on, so add it on each device you use. Without a key, the summary tick box simply stays off.
• Storage — how much space you're using and what's still free.
• The Donate button — you can hide Donate from the menu entirely; that's fine, and this switch brings it back.
• Your passphrase — change it here (you'll get a fresh emergency kit; other devices are signed out).
• Recently deleted — deleted entries wait 30 days here.
• Closing your account — you can delete your own account, entirely and permanently. Download a backup first: once the account is closed, the backup is the only copy of your timeline in the world.

The demo, and donating

The sign-in screen has “Just looking? Try the demo” — a shared example timeline anyone can wander around. Don't put anything personal in it: everyone sees the same demo, and it wipes itself clean at midnight. A real account is nothing like this — private, encrypted, yours.

The app is free, with 250 MB of space per account. If it has been useful and you can spare something, donations (see the Donate page, or the link in About this app) keep it running — and as a thank-you, donators get 1 GB of space. Nothing is automatic; it's handled by hand.

Common questions

I've forgotten my passphrase.

Use “Forgotten your passphrase?” on the sign-in screen with your six recovery words. If you've lost the passphrase and the six words, nobody can open the account — that is the price of nobody being able to read your timeline.

My invite link says it's used or expired.

That link is only for setting up your account the first time, so it stops working once you've used it — that message usually just means your account is already made. You don't need a new link: go to the app's own address and sign in with your account name and passphrase. (If you genuinely never finished setting up and the link has run out — they last seven days — ask for a fresh one.)

The timeline shows things I'm not ready to see.

Tap hide on an entry to cover what it says, or hide all above the entries to cover everything at once — and Settings → Hiding entries can hide the titles too. Nothing is deleted; show brings it back whenever you're ready. (See “Covering what's hard to see”.)

A file won't attach.

Attachments can be up to 4 MB each, and uploading needs a connection. The rest of the entry still saves; add the file when you're back online.

I deleted something I didn't mean to.

Settings → Recently deleted keeps entries for 30 days. Attachments removed from an entry are recoverable the same way, through the entry's restore.

Is my timeline really private?

Yes. It's encrypted in your browser with keys that come from your passphrase. What's stored online is unreadable without them — to the app's administrator, to Google (where the encrypted files live), to anyone. The exported PDF and the downloaded backup are the readable copies you choose to make; treat them with care.

There is one deliberate exception, and only if you switch it on. The AI summary on the export page sends your entries to Google to be summarised. It is off unless you turn it on, it needs a key you add yourself, and the tick box says plainly what it does before you use it. Leave it alone and nothing you write ever leaves your device unencrypted.

Why “Hold Your Line”

The name means two things, and both are meant. “Holding the line” is what the emergency services do — standing firm for other people, often at a cost to themselves. This app is a small way of holding the line for you, for a change.

And it is your line: your record, in your order, in your words — a line of events that only you can unlock. Keeping hold of that, when things are hard to prove or hard to remember, is what the whole app is for.

Hold Your Line — user guide, July 2026. The app and this guide are free. If anything here doesn't match what you see on screen, the app has probably improved since this was written.