Searching your Diary

Hi Everyone,

A couple of quick announcements…

Firstly, after a user request for a facility to allow searching of your own diary (possible already with the Search engine) we have updated it slightly to allow you to put a link to it on your own diary. When you want to search a particular users’ diary just put their username in the username field and all results will be limited to that diary.

If you are a diarist, simply put the following link somewhere:

http://www.deardiary.org/cgi-bin/viewer.cgi?submit=Search&suser=USERNAME

(replace USERNAME with your username).

When someone goes to that link, the username will be hard coded and prefilled in to your username so anything they type in will only search your diary.

You now have a search engine for your diaries! 😉

Second news, work on Dear Diary 3 has officially begun and work on adding subscription facilities to Dear Diary 2.1 begins either today or tomorrow. Dear Diary 3 is a complete rewrite from the ground up of the system taking into account all of the feedback that we have received to date that has been difficult (or impossible) to fix in the current codebase. A prime example is the customiser, I am happy to report that the new customisation facility will be very visual and extremely easy to use (it’s shaping up nicely already). All of the comments and feedback we have received has been going into a database and we’ll get as much as we can into Dear Diary 3 – although there will be a lot that has to wait until 3.1 (to give you an idea, Dear Diary 2.1 is currently around 20,000 lines of code, that’s a lot and it’s going to take a while just to get Dear Diary 3 doing everything that 2.1 does, let alone more…).

We’re aiming to get Dear Diary 3 doing everything that 2.1 does, add some of the more hotly requested features and then go live with it – once that’s out we’ll work on adding other features that are requested and doing reasonably regular upgrades to the system. This should mean that the system doesn’t go for months without an upgrade and then suddenly gets a mammoth upgrade in facilities, we’d rather do more rapid releases with a few in each. The new environment we’re developing for Dear Diary 3.0 should permit us to add new features much quicker as well!

I shan’t say much more about Dear Diary 3.0 🙂

As always, if you have any suggestions that you would like us to incorporate into this rewrite (now is by far the best time to make suggestions) then please drop us a note at the support address below.

We estimate that the 2.1 release supporting subscriptions shouldn’t take too long to get online – once we have a more firm date, we’ll let you know.

Matt.