Diary-X
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Diary-X (commonly abbreviated dx) was the name of an online journaling service which allowed internet users to create and maintain a journal or diary. While similar in form to other services such as LiveJournal, Diary-X attempted to encourage longer, more introspective entries in lieu of the shorter, link-heavy entries that are more prevalent on other services. Because of this, Diary-X never referred to itself as a blogging service — it was instead a journaling service that happened to be online.
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[edit] History
Diary-X held a limited beta test in June 2000, but did not officially launch until August 7, 2000. Immediately after the official launch, Diary-X underwent significant growth. Signups compounded at an average of 1.25% per day for a year, ending in August 2001 with nearly 10,000 users. The growth continued at that rate until signups were closed in late 2002 due to support demands from Diary-X users outstripping what the sole administrator could provide.
When signups came back online in March 2003, they contained a roadblock which required users to wait a minimum of 12 hours before their accounts were activated. This functionality was created specifically to weed out people who were not interested in actually maintaining a journal (e.g., those users who were really looking for a blog host).
As of 2005, the site hosted approximately 120,000 journals, of which roughly 8,000 were being actively maintained.
In February 2006, the main drive on which the diaries were saved failed, and the sole proprietor of the site sent the drive for data recovery. On February 24, 2006, it was announced that the drive was irrevocably damaged and all data was indeed lost. The owner stated that rather than try to resurrect the site, it would be formally closed down as of March 31, 2006.
As of March 2006, a community project, called Codexed, is underway to construct a site which combines the features popularized by Diary-X (using its original codebase as a launching point), with more modern features popular on other services. This community project is made up of a core team of one administrator, five department leads, and one project co-ordinator, as well as a large number of community contributors. The administrator of Diary-X plans to contribute to the new project, but will not be involved in the administration.
[edit] Features
Diary-X featured a fully-interactive templating system which allowed users to specify the look and feel of their journal using raw HTML and CSS, or choose from one of the pre-built templates, from which they could specify a selected number of features, such as the colors. The site intentionally limited the number of journal entries that could be displayed per page to exactly one, unlike blogging, which allows multiple entries on one page. One page entries required the user to 'fill the page', hopefully with something insightful.
[edit] Community
The community aspect was less pronounced than among other sites like Xanga and LiveJournal, but the site offered a set of forums for social interaction and technical support. The community, on the whole, discouraged SMS language and leet speak, in the belief that these are destroying the English language.
Former Diary-X users refer to themselves as Diary-Xers or dxers.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- [1] Codexed, the rebuilding project
