DearDiary.Net turns 25 years old this year. Have a look below at the 'whois' excerpt for the domain name if you want proof ;-)
Domain Name: deardiary.org
Registry Domain ID: 7e63848f2570491494df1b686ba93b2c-LROR
Registrar WHOIS Server: http://whois.cloudflare.com
Registrar URL: http://www.cloudflare.com
Updated Date: 2023-07-14T09:44:21Z
Creation Date: 1999-09-12T23:48:50Z
We (Matt and Steve) registered deardiary.net about a month after deardiary.org. September 12th 1999. We were so young and carefree back then. With lofty dreams. Some of us may have made those dreams come true too!
But what does this mean for us? What do I mean with a 'birthday resurrection'?
Well if you've been a DearDiary user for any length of time, you'll know it's been through something of a history. In 1999 the site looked similar to that which you're looking at today. At the time it was doing things that people didn't even know was possible. Drop shadows on a calendar required some awful HTML code behind the scenes to get it to work. Even getting a calendar to work back then was hard. Never mind any business logic needed to actually generate the pages. Then after about 6 months we decided we didn't like the crumpled paper look (I have no idea why, it looks good!) so it underwent a redesign. Still had to have the same awful code behind it though.
After some time, Matt and Steve - for reasons I don't even remember - parted company. Matt took UKTrainSim, Steve took DearDiary.Net.
Various incarnations later led to the ultimate closure of the site for most people sometime around 2022. At that time, only users who became Patrons could use the site. Without those Patrons all of this would now be gone, for good. Patrons, you have saved the site and led to this day! We thank and salute you.
Today I am announcing that DearDiary.Net is returning to public usage. There are some changes to how it will work - the most notable of which is that diaries will be private by default. If you wish to have a public diary you will need to subscribe for a Plus Member account. Free diaries will only be private. Free users will be able to share some of their entries publicly though, through a specificly generated address. More details on that later.
This incarnation of DearDiary.Net is a full rewrite of the platform using the very original database. If you were a member of DearDiary.Net from 1999 to approx some time in 2019 your diary should be here. If you signed up or moved to the WordPress system (or are a Patron) I will need to do some manual work to 'backport' your entries to this database, but they are still available too and I will happily backport anyone's diary who wants it.
I won't go into too much detail here, but many new features are planned and the platform technology is super flexible to work with.
I'm excited to see what we can do together once again. As I've grown older (and perhaps wiser) I've learned more about what the original DearDiary.Net meant to so many of you. I've learned the importance of journalling. And I apologise for taking away public access.
But let's look forward rather than back. DearDiary.Net is back. And will be driven by you guys - let me know which features are important to you and what you want to see next.
Please drop me a line using the Contact button at the top if you have any questions or feedback. I'll keep you posted through entries on this diary and potentially a new series of YouTube videos too, but I'll announce those as they happen.
Thanks, and welcome back!
Steve.