New DearDiary Software

Those of you who’ve been here a while will notice that the site has changed considerably… Those people who’ve been involved in the Facebook group ‘Future of DearDiary.Net’ will not be overly surprised at this, but other people may be…
If you wish to continue using the old site, please go to www.deardiary.org instead – your original diary and all its settings remain there.
You can migrate your diary to this new site if you desire, using the Migrate Diary menu at the top. If you choose to do this, your diary will STILL EXIST at www.deardiary.org. Updates you make on the original site will NOT be reflected here once you’ve migrated. We advise that once you’ve migrated you no longer use the www.deardiary.org archive site (and in fact, in future the ability to do so will be disabled).
If you have any questions please visit the Future Of DearDiary group on Facebook or the DearDiary.Net fan page on Facebook and ask away.

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9 Comments

  1. Ah, so you tell me AFTER I try the migration and then continue to make entries that new entries over at the original diary will be lost when you complete the migration. I guess those of us who do not use Facebook don’t rate updates like the rest of the little inner circle.
    I cannot believe that after over ten years with this site you’ve done this to me.

    1. Dissapointingly after 10 years you choose to believe that if you have an issue with the site I won’t help you find a solution!
      If you have entries you want to keep from when you were testing I’ll export them for you before re-migrating your diary.
      I can’t do that for everyone but you have this issue because you were helping me test, so I will be happy to do it for you…

  2. Steve,
    I’ve tried to post in Support web form and got:
    “Failed to send your message. Please try later or contact the administrator by another method”
    Is it not working yet? (the old site link Help Me sends to the same new web form page 🙁 ). As I have no other ways to contact you, I thought, I’d ask you here. Is there anywhere wher I can post my questions about new diary so that they can be responded? They are, actually, generic questions, not re personal diary, so it might be beneficial if we’ll have a place to ask and get an answer from yourself or other diarists who figured it out already.
    Thanks in advance!
    Lana

  3. Hi Lana,
    It should be working, I just tried it myself and it sent. It’s possible that the server was too busy when you tried as it does view mail as something that can be retried later (possibly incorrectly now, but historically that was correct!)
    If you’re on Facebook, drop in to the ddfuture group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/ddfuture/
    If you’re not, I do intend on setting up a forum system that will enable people to do exactly as you’ve suggested, but that may be some time. Instead, feel free to contact me via a comment as you have done. If it’s a private thing make sure you tick the private comment box 🙂

  4. Hi, sorry, have resent you my message above without checking your reply first. Ignore it. I prefer to post my questions here, as more people might see your answers then on fb.
    so, here they are.(apologies for overflooding :-))
    1. “plus” users – please confirm that private entries won’t become public after migration as there is a confusion among diarists about this.
    2. friends list feature – I take it that any old DD friends will have to be re-added into “friends” access list in the Dashboard again? (cannot check this at the moment, as the migrated diary is not “plus”, sorry) if this is the case, would they be able to authenticate on the new site without having to migrate their diary over? I have tried to logon to the new site with the non-migrated username and it didn’t work. Is this by design and users will be forced to migrate in order to read friends only entries of their friends or will there be an option to “logon now, migrate diary later”?
    3. Stats/Hits feature – is this going to be available for “Plus” users only? I’ve tried to add a widget, but it didn’t seem to work for free account 🙁
    4. Is there any perspective in future to create your own theme in a way like in the old dd – with custom fonts and entries background? If it is available already, where can I find it?
    5. The Permalink in every entry, while can be a useful thing for some, but can it be hidden if the author wants so?
    6. I also think it can be useful to have a Migration page with the info where one can find new features that match/replace the old ones. I think, many of those who’ll migrate, would want to have them back, but it seems rather difficult to navigate the search for those who never used WordPress. Just my thoughts.
    7. BTW – the Search Diaries on the bottom of the home page doesn’t seem to search diarist’s name – is this by design?
    Best wishes
    Lana

    1. Hi Lana,
      I’m happy to answer the questions here too so everyone can see them 🙂
      1/ Plus subscriptions are carried across and everyone who’s previously tested the friends system has said that friends only diaries, friends only entries and private entries are migrated correctly. If you have specific concerns the best bet is to hook up a time with me to do the migration so that I can be around to delete the migration if you discover something is wrong.
      2/ Friends will have to be re-added because they’re both done on IDs rather than names but the IDs are different on the new system unfortunately. Also, because the two systems are totally separate in terms of usernames (but with some hooks in places to ensure that a name that’s already taken on the old system cannot be re-used on the new one unless it’s by the same person). Having said that, there is currently no scope to allow the username to be added here without migrating the diary. But I’ll see if I can come up with a solution to that!
      3/ You can’t add plugins, only I can do that. However, if you let me know which plugin it is I can add it for you, and of course I can mark it as useable by freebies too.
      4/ Yes, this is a future feature. I’m not entirely sure how much customization will be required, I’m still thinking about it 🙂
      5/ The permalink merely refers to the address your entry is located at. It can’t be removed because then there’d be no way to access the entry 🙂
      6/ Hmmmm, the systems are pretty different, some features simply don’t map. But I can see what I can do.
      7/ No, that would seem to be broken 🙂 If you’d like to raise a bug for that at http://www.qodo.org/bugs that’d be great!
      Hope that helps!
      Steve

  5. Steve, thank you so much for a promt repsonse! much appreciated.
    I have now reported the “bug”, as you suggested (Bug 47)
    as for the stats, as far as I can see, the plugin would be Jetpack: http://jetpack.me/
    regarding re-adding friends to friend-only. hmmm…I can see the potential tension about this as some people might not be ready to migrate their diaries yet, but would like to keep reading their friend’s journals. this can discourage those who would want to migrate but if the most of their friends aren’t there, there would be no point to do so for them.
    I would suggest to consider a way how the users from two systems can have read permissions in both and read-write in the one where their diary is.
    as an alternative, it might be easier to provide an optional feature of “copy this entry to…dd.org” so that unmigrated friends can still read it?
    I know the permalink can’t be removed, I just thought it could have an option to make it “nvisible” on the posted entry. but do not worry, it’s just my personal preferences, as I don’t like to fill my pages with the clicable things that you don’t suppose to click. In the end of a day, it is not important, really.
    I’ve noticed, the features do not match, I just thought, having no previous experience with world press, I found it difficult not to configure various settings that I used to have in my old diary as such, but to find where they are and how are they called in the new place. Not talking of the fancy details, but just basic features like set font for the entry; set entry background; configure default settings for comments; header; footer; etc. these are all available in the both DDs but not straight forward to find in the new one.
    anyway, still, most grateful for your help in clarifying my questions. great job on the new site and best of luck for the future!
    Lana
    PS is there such feature as a “sticky thread” in this blog? I suppose, you could’ve pin the questions and answers posts to the top of the blog or in special category with the link to it? (not request, just suggestion of a quick-fix before the forum is set up)

  6. [PRIVATE COMMENT]
    Hi Steve,
    so to “bug” you again with few more “bugs”…so I’ve migrated my second diary, the Plus account Misstick.
    first things I’m struggling with and are important to me:
    1. after migration some entries appears to have a piece of HTML code posted in them, some – in the begining of an entry, others – at the end of it. No pattern found in this. The earliest entry with HTML I found would be in July 2010 and any random entry after that one. the code might be related to the entries that I’ve copied/pasted from the Word, however, other entries I did the ame way are fine, so this is intemitten.
    the piece of code left in the entries is the same one(word formatting or something?) :
    Normal
    false
    false
    false
    MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
    /* Style Definitions */
    table.MsoNormalTable
    {mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
    mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
    mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
    mso-style-noshow:yes;
    mso-style-parent:””;
    mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt;
    mso-para-margin:0cm;
    mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
    mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
    font-size:10.0pt;
    font-family:”Times New Roman”;
    mso-ansi-language:#0400;
    mso-fareast-language:#0400;
    mso-bidi-language:#0400;}
    It would be annoying to have to go checking each entry to remove these manually – that’s two years of posts! :-/
    2. I’ve found few entries I wrote in russian (private entries) that have not been encoded correctly, any attempt to change encoding to variants of Cyrillics didn’t make this particular entry readable. On the other hand, few other russian entries migrated fine. With this one, I’m ok to go manually and re-post them from the old diary, as there shouldn’t be too many of those. I just thought, I’d let you know. Perhaps, if this is a bug, the users can avoid the issue by changing default encoding on original diary prior to migration? don’t know how this might work.
    I I would like to have a way to resolve the first issue though, even if this means – you deleting my migrated diary and I’m to migrate it again. Though it would be nice to know if there is anything I can do prior migration to avoid the same issue.
    PS I have made my migrated diary Private only for now, as it would be embarassing to have corrupted posts in it. If you are unable to see it this way, let me know and I’ll un-private it for you to see what I’m talking about.
    Have more questions, but those can wait. Let’s sort the first one first. do you want me to report this as a bug?
    thanks in advance
    Lana.

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