DearDiary.Net is fun, free site where you can write your own online diary. An online diary can also be known as an online journal, or more commonly these days as a blog.
DearDiary.Net was first made available to the public in 1999 using bespoke software developed by two British blokes, Matt Peddlesden and Steve Brown and was written in Perl5. The software has survived for 12 years, almost untouched, although occasional updates were made and a multitude of bugfixes occurred. The software grew as the site grew to provide additional features and security updates. But, ultimately, the software remains in 1999 and a rewrite became necessary.
That rewrite occurred about 4 times in total, although none of the rewrites actually made it out of the computer on which they were developed. Matt is no longer active, and Steve working on his own couldn’t hope to produce the site without assistance.
That’s when it became clear that utilising an existing system and adding DearDiary ‘extensions’ was the best way to go. In that time WordPress was being developed and has since become a mature product that is very worthy of being used as the base system for DearDiary. As such, DearDiary.Net is now built on top of WordPress with a bunch of ‘Must Use’ plugins that provide additional functionality to provide features that the original DearDiary.Net provided.
So, if you want to start your own online diary, you’ll find DearDiary.Net is easy to use (particularly if you’re already familiar with WordPress) and provides all the functionality you need. If you find there’s something you need that it doesn’t do, well, you can put in a request to have it developed and there’s a good chance you’ll soon be able to do it!