diaryland.com

Author's product rating:   

Quality of Discussions

Excellent

Advantages:	Win friends and influence people
Disadvantages:	Make enemies and piss people off

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

These days the Internet is full to bursting with journalling, diary writing, and blogging sites. If you haven’t come across one, you will almost certainly have read about them in your newspaper or favourite magazine. Many of the weekend papers carry lists and reviews of favourite online journals. On the off-chance you haven’t heard of this phenomenon, this is basically how it works. The site hosts your journal, and you update it every day (or as often as you can manage) through your browser. Journals and blogs (short for web log) range from random musings updated throughout the day, to lists of sites visited, to obsessive teenage angst, to tales of sexual conquest, to earnest attempts to analyse the world, to straight recording of the lives of people in every corner of the globe. They come in all styles from the literary, to the funny, through the ponderous to the tongue in cheek.

Diaryland is a site where you can sign up for your own free online diary. It’s been running since late 1999, and is mostly the work of one guy called Andrew. His commitment has always been that the basic service will be free, and no banner ads or pop-ups will be placed on members’ journals. All that is required is that you have a link to Diaryland somewhere on your journal page, which isn’t really much to ask.

As the service took off, a real community feel developed and the facilities were extended to offer members ways to communicate with each other (guestbooks, notes, and chat facilities), dedicated email addresses, webrings where journals of similar subjects can be linked to each other, and more recently the ability to set questionnaires for other members to complete (much like some of the challenges we’ve seen on Ciao recently). Although the basic service is still free, members demanded more and were willing to pay for the extras, so Gold Membership was introduced where members pay ($10 for 3 months, $18 for 6 months, or $30 for a year’s membership in advance) to have 5mb of image hosting and real-time stats about who is visiting and where they came from. This was so successful that SuperGold Membership was introduced ($18, $30 and $54), offering 30mb of image hosting, webmail, and a facility for readers to leave comments under specific entries, rather than just general comments lumped together in a guestbook. Attractive as the enhanced memberships are, my budget doesn’t extend to them and I rub along very nicely with the free service. It's well worth having, specially at that price!

To get your own free online journal, all you need to do is point your browser at www.diaryland.com and sign up with your own user name and password. The site is very clear and well laid out with good “plain English” instructions and explanations for how to do everything. Once you have signed up, you log into the Members Area, which is the hub of everything you want to do on the site. The colour scheme is restful shades of lilac, with pale yellow highlights. A navigation bar runs down the left of the screen, with each link being self-explanatory, and the information associated with each link is displayed on the main screen to the right of the navigation bar. It couldn’t be simpler.

The link you will use most often is the Add New Entry link. Clicking on this will bring up a dialogue box into which you are supposed to type your entry. Each page of your journal is created dynamically by using a template and incorporating the text you just supplied into it. You don’t need to know any HTML whatsoever. It’s very similar to submitting an opinion on Ciao and, like Ciao, every so often it crashes when you are at a critical point and you lose all your work. For this reason, most people write their entries offline in Notepad or Word, and simply paste them into the dialogue box. Also on this page, you can choose whether you want your entries to appear in journal style (one entry per page), or weblog style (several entries per page).

Once you have written your first entry, you can choose to change the template you use, and therefore how each page of your journal will look. The simplest way to do this is to click on “Change Template” in the Members Area and choose one of the ones Diaryland offers. More are being added all the time, and they are serviceable if fairly basic. However, if you have any HTML knowledge you can customise the Diaryland template, or design your own to have complete control over how your journal will look. Once you have done this, Diaryland stores your template for you, and all you have to do is add the text for your entry each time.

Even with the basic free service you can include pictures in your journal, both in the template and in individual entries. Unless you have paid for image hosting, you will have to place these images in web space somewhere else and link to them. Bear in mind that many free web space providers will not allow hosting of images that are to be served elsewhere nowadays. Check with your ISP or web host before trying to do this. If you have one of the enhanced packages with image hosting included, you simply click on Upload Image in the Members Area and upload through the browser. There are clear instructions for how to make the image appear in your journal on the site. Using off-site hosting for pictures requires a knowledge of the HTML syntax for images.

Each member’s journal has a unique URL in the form of http://username.diaryland.com .This takes you directly to the member’s journal without going through the Diaryland page (though the member has to go the main site to add entries), so it really is like having your own website. After all, your journal is all about YOUR identity. The Diaryland site is just a resource, and a very good one it is.

Perhaps you fancy the idea of keeping an online journal, but want to keep it just for your own eyes or for a select group of your friends? No problem. You can choose whether to make your journal public or private. If you choose private, you journal will not be listed in the Diaryland directory of members. It will only be accessible by someone typing in the exact URL, which no one will know unless you tell them. Alternatively, you can make it public, but protect it with a password, so only those you give the password to can access it. All these options are a simple click away. Public journals are spidered by Google, and it can be astonishing the search terms that bring people your way. My most frequent is “what does Guantanamera mean?” which I happened to muse on while writing about cuban music. I still don’t know, so perhaps one of our multi-lingual Ciao-ers could put me, and half of cyberspace, out of our collective misery?

Diaryland, in some ways, has been a victim of it’s own success. I don’t think Andrew could ever have foreseen how popular it would become. His commitment to keeping it free has provided some sticky moments for him financially, and at times the servers have struggled to keep up with demand. That being said, I’ve been a member since August 2000, and I can count on the fingers of both hands the number of times the site has been down. Downtime most often happens when he is upgrading, and you can’t really blame him for that. Planned downtime is always forewarned in the Member Area, and unplanned downtime is explained with suitable apologies. Queries and technical problems are dealt with swiftly in my experience, though they do say the paying members get priority in busy periods.

I’ve been very happy with the Diaryland experience. As well as providing a creative outlet for me, it’s allowed me to “meet” and make friends with people I’d never have come across otherwise – some local, and some on the other side of the world. I’ve laughed and cried with these people, worried about them, been inspired by them, been educated by them. Finding the good ones is the trick, as there is a LOT of dross out there, but the longer you hang around the wider your “recommended” list becomes. One good one leads you on to the next, and so on, and if you’re really lucky the good ones find you too. Beware, it gets addictive!

The only bad thing I can find to say about Diaryland is that keeping an online journal leads to conversations like this with your real life friends:

You: Oh, did I tell you about….?
Friend: No but I read it in your journal.
You: Oh right. Well, last week after I saw you I….
Friend: I know.

If you can live with that, get yourself over to Diaryland and sign up. Oh, and if you happen on someone called catsmother…wave, cos it’s me.

PS: Some of the questions don't apply to Diaryland, as it's not really a chat forum. I've suggested Ciao create a new category for journalling sites, so if you know of one you want to write about, please request it be added so we can have a category.