The Original (and still the best) DD.Net
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.
Comments (8)
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... :-)
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.
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.
I also used that button to find and interact with other diary’s hopefully lots of people will catch on and start to write
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?!
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!
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?!
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.