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Everything you need to know about VipaBase: from your first course to data export.
Introduction
VipaBase is your personal Vipassana meditation course tracker. Log every sit or serve course you take and keep everything organized in one place.
- Register courses with date, place, teacher, mode and duration.
- View your full history with a filterable, sortable table.
- Maintain a daily meditation streak.
- Export and import data as JSON, or migrate from Excel or Word.
- Everything synced to the cloud with your account.
Registering a course
- Sign in to VipaBase.
- Go to the Courses page from the dashboard sidebar menu.
- Fill in the course start date using the date picker.
- Select the country where the course took place. If it doesn't appear, start typing and it will be added automatically.
- Select the venue — only centers in your chosen country are shown. You can also type a new one.
- Enter the teacher's name (optional).
- Choose the mode: sit or serve.
- Enter how many days the course lasted.
- Add notes or comments if you like (optional).
- Click Save and the course will appear in your dashboard automatically.
FAQ
Dashboard
The dashboard gives you an overview of your practice and access to all features.
- Summary cards: total courses, days sitting, days serving, countries visited.
- Courses table: sort by any column, search by text, filter by mode.
- "Download JSON" button: export all your courses as a JSON file.
- "Import JSON" button: load courses from a previously exported JSON file.
Daily meditation streak
The Daily Practice page lets you track your meditation sessions day by day and build the habit.
- Each streak has a start date and an end date.
- Active streaks have no end date and are marked with the "active" badge.
- You can only have one active streak at a time. Starting a new one automatically closes the previous one.
- Use the DatePicker to select the exact day, month and year.
Convert Excel or Word with ChatGPT
If you have courses logged in Excel, Word, Google Sheets, Notion or any other format, use ChatGPT to convert them to VipaBase JSON format.
- Copy the content from your document (Excel table, Word list, whatever format).
- Go to ChatGPT (chatgpt.com).
- Paste this exact prompt (replace ONLY the fields in [brackets]):
- Paste your document content below the prompt and send it.
- ChatGPT will return a JSON. Copy that JSON to your clipboard.
- Go back to VipaBase, navigate to the Courses page, and use the "Import JSON" button.
Before you start, make sure the dates in your document use a consistent format (e.g., YYYY-MM-DD or DD/MM/YYYY) to avoid conversion errors.
Exporting and importing data
VipaBase lets you download all your courses as JSON and re-import them whenever you need.
- On the dashboard, click "Download JSON". A courses.json file will be downloaded.
- To import, go to the Courses page and use the "Import JSON" button. Select the file and courses will be loaded automatically.
- You can also convert data from Excel, Word or other formats using ChatGPT (see previous section).
Changing the background
VipaBase lets you personalize your experience by choosing a background image for the app.
- Click your avatar in the top-right corner to open the user menu.
- Select "Background" from the dropdown.
- A slide-in panel will appear with four background options: Forest, Bodhi Leaf, Sacred Leaves, and Sacred Fig.
- Click on an image to select it. The background updates instantly.
- Use the opacity slider to adjust how visible the background image is behind the content.
- Your selection is saved automatically and persists across sessions.
Image attributions
Some background images used in VipaBase are from Pixabay and Unsplash, released under the Pixabay Content License and the Unsplash License respectively. Icons are from Icons8. Attribution is not required but we gratefully acknowledge the creators.