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The Original (and still the best) DD.Net
Sun Aug 11 2024

Original DD

A Wayback Machine Screenshot of the Original DD

Pictured above is a WayBack Machine capture of the original DearDiary.Net as at November 27 1999. Unfortunately, the pencil (which was red) isn't showing because - lol - my browser is 'older and doesnt support the newer image features'. Well that bit aged well didn't it. Hahah.

If you want to have a look for yourselves, I highly recommend getting onto the Wayback Machine and having a look. It's limited because of course the nature of DearDiary.Net is dynamic and without the actual software behind it to generate some of the content it might be missing.

8 Comments
  • From:
    D'vorahDavida
    On:
    Sun Aug 11 2024
    Hey! That "All diaries' drop down menu might be kind of nice to have back eh? But I suppose could be unwieldy once you have thousands of them... You know... :-)
    • From:
      DearDiary1
      On:
      Sun Aug 11 2024
      It was unwieldy back then - today's hardware would shrug. The query that the NavButtons uses to discover the previous and next entries would've taken about 3 hours to give an answer. On my tests it took 57 milliseconds... Times have changed lol.
      • From:
        D'vorahDavida
        On:
        Sun Aug 11 2024
        57 seven milliseconds. WOW. Times HAVE changed! I think I used to use that 'show me all diaries' to find new diarist to read. Do you remember "Life of Louise" and Realm of Rachel" ? They were two friends going to university together. I think they were literature majors. I LOVED reading their diaries. I miss their quirky look at their lives at the time.
        • From:
          Wrenchman366
          On:
          Sun Aug 11 2024
          I also used that button to find and interact with other diary’s hopefully lots of people will catch on and start to write
  • From:
    MissTick
    On:
    Mon Aug 12 2024
    hurray! we can now navigate this ship with the navigation menu! the missing feature is back! Also - it was so evil of you to have us hooked to the WayBack Machine, I've been browsing it for hours now, instead of working! totally addicted...oh, those all-too-familiar diaries to see! JustAnotherBeth, cpthereturn, teaeyeger, Welshamethyst...oh, and not to mention HamiPiks, remember HamiPiks?! ...have to stop, where is my willpower?!
    • From:
      DearDiary1
      On:
      Mon Aug 12 2024
      Yeah, unfortunately Hamipiks (or it's predecessor, AtomIC Album) is unrecoverable. It was costing a lot of money to rent the disk space for that one - and Google and Apple (and others) do a better job of it anyway. But I'd love to see some more of those diaries back - JustAnotherBeth, Katrina, CPTheReturn, all of them. They show up in people's comments sections and I wonder what they're all doing now!
  • From:
    MissTick
    On:
    Mon Aug 12 2024
    just a thought came to my mind...we can have a reunion virtual party for Anniversary - open a single page where everyone can leave a comment, maybe without having to registered (or at least, with blank password for a day) and invite old diarists to come just for a party (I'm sure, some of us still have other means of connecting to friends from old times...spread the word, without pressure of having to do something, like register/reset passwords/log in/etc...who knows, maybe this will bring back old memories and with them - old diarists back?!
    • From:
      D'vorahDavida
      On:
      Mon Aug 12 2024
      I know one old diarist I could invite that I have kept in touch with.. no, two! One is my sister in law. Does anyone remember Billy Teabags? OMG... he used to write the most hilarious diary! I even wrote a blog post about it when he stopped writing. It was called 'Come Back Billy Teabags'. Boo Hoo... Which brings to mind one of the main reasons I loved (and still do) Dear Diary. There are people on here that were talented writers. I hope we can find some of them again, or if not, attract some new ones. We'll see how it goes in the coming weeks and months. I think waiting for the actual anniversary to arrive, for a kind of formal launch is a good idea. We could sort of blitz our available social media with the invitation from all of us writing here now. I'm hoping to start a new diary myself here in addition to Yetzirah, but I've been waiting for a few things to settle here on the homestead. Houseguests, commitments, and re-adjusting of my schedule... all those kind of things that prevent me from focusing on a new thing.