Greetings everyone,
It's been some considerable time since I last posted anything on here - I'm not even sure if anyone reads this any more?! There's a fair bit of news to tell you all, which I'll go into shortly, but the main point of this particular entry is to tell you all that deardiary.net is moving server shortly.
At this stage I'm not entirely sure quite where DD will be housed. It may end up on it's own server entirely because to be honest, it's a beast of a site and consumes far more server resources than any other site we run on the server. Having said that, hardware is significantly more powerful these days than even the last time we moved, let alone 11 years ago when all this started, so it may be OK to be shared with some of our other stuff. Nevertheless, a move will be happening shortly as we're consolidating servers and shrinking the monthly server budget.
But never fear, DD isn't disappearing - although it may look that way for a day or two while the internet catches up with the move.
Other News
I no longer work in IT. After 25 years in the IT game I got sick of it, really sick of it. So I retrained and I am now a Patient Transport Officer, ferrying sick and injured people around the countryside from hospital to home, home to hospital and occasionally hospital to hospital. The work is SOOOO much more rewarding than anything I ever did in IT, even if the pay is not so good. You might think this isn't good news for DearDiary because if I'm no longer in IT then I won't be doing any work on DearDiary. The astute amongst you will have noticed that in fact, little work has been done on DearDiary for something like 6 years, so lets face it, a career change wouldn't make things any worse would they?
I believe in fact that quite the reverse will happen. Because I am no longer relying on IT for my paid job, I can restore DearDiary into the great hobby it initially started out being. I used to enjoy working on DearDiary and some of my other IT home projects - but gradually over the years, being overwhelmed by IT stuff that paid my wage each month meant that I cared little for it as a hobby in my spare time. Now that I don't have any IT worries at work, I can go back to enjoying the stuff I want to do in IT - and DearDiary will hopefully once again become a joy to work with.
With that in mind, thank you so much to all the people who've stuck with us over the past 10 years. I hope your patience will be rewarded soon.
I've decided that instead of a total rewrite for DearDiary - which has been on the cards for the last 100 years or more - I'm going to replace little pieces of it at a time. In the long run that's not such a great idea - but history reveals that trying to bite off a whole rewrite just doesn't happen. So, small bitesized portions of upgrades here and there will be attempted, once the move is complete. Eventually the whole system will be in new technologies and hopefully taking advantage of web 2.0 stuff before it all becomes obsolete again!
Also, Rose and I had a gorgeous little baby boy on April 15th 2010, and he's just so special. I'll share some photos with you soon.
In the meantime, if you're a twitter user, follow @deardiarynet for the latest updates, snippets and other 21st century stuff - I look forward to seeing you follow us soon! Who knows, we might even follow you back :-)