February 19, 2004

No Rhyme or Reason

Happy Friday everybody,

I’ve got a list of things scribbled on my notepad that I’m working from, after going through notes and e-mail this morning. Here’s what’s happening, in no particular order:

The use of the phrase “what’s happening” in the first paragraph of this entry led to two things –

1) thoughts of an overly-jolly, overtly-colorfully-dressed, beret-wearing gentleman bouncing down a sidewalk to a synth-nightmare soundtrack. Yes, it’s Rerun. If you don’t know what I’m talking about – you’re lucky. You too could be doomed to have this image stuck in your head, if you were of the right age.

2) Lumberg standing at the door of my cubicle saying, “Hey Peter, whaaat’s happening?”. Except that I’m not working in a cubicle, and my name’s not Peter. A Google search (I refuse to use “google” as a verb, as in “I googled Lumberg”) of “office space + lumberg” to confirm that I was spelling Lumberg’s name correctly led me to this site, one of the finest uses of the Internet I’ve seen to date. Check out the FAQ and gallery of staplers.

I digress. Again.

You may notice that I’m messing with the format of my entries, trying to add a little life to the businessness of posting these wonderfully informative and entertaining missives.

Don’t know if I like it, don’t know if I’ll keep it.

A member wrote asking why if her friend has added her to her favorites, why her friend doesn’t show up in her “favorite of” list. Like that made sense. Anyways, please remember that for a person to show up in your “favorite of” list, their favorites have to be set to public. This is not the default, and has to be changed specifically – by going to the Privacy Settings screen on the Diary Maintenance menu. Once your favorites are set to public, you will show up on “favorite of” lists.
Another diarist reported receiving an e-mail from “admin@opendiary.com”, reporting that her e-mail address was about to expire. The e-mail contained an attachment with a virus. Please be aware that this is a trick that many virus-writers are using these days – they take a popular domain name (like opendiary.com or yahoo.com) and attach “admin@” to it as the source address, to make you think it is official mail from that site. We do not use an “admin” address, so if you receive mail like this, delete it immediately. Also remember that you should never open e-mail attachments that come to you from somebody you don’t know – they will very often contain viruses.
I received several queries about how to report a Rules violation. Please remember to use the Help menu and the Contact Our Staff form, selecting Rules violation as the message type. This works much faster than leaving the report in my notes, which are often the last thing I look at. Related to this, please be sure to use the new option on the Contact form to report any problem with OD Plus subscription payments – so that they can be resolved as quickly as possible.
Somebody pointed out that the diary search (available to Plus members only) was not turning up a certain string that appeared in more than one of his entries. On investigation, I found that the string in question appeared in the title of several of his entries, but not in the text. And the diary search was searching only the text, not the titles. Who designed that? Of course, you would want to search the titles of entries as well – so I’ve changed it to be so.
A problem was reported in display of chapter titles, which turned out to be the result of using double-quotes (like “) in chapter descriptions. I’ve coded around this problem, so if you had a chapter display that looked screwy and you have quotes in your descriptions, it should be okay now.
The age that was displaying for diarists on the Reader’s Choice page was showing up different than the actual age of the writer. Sometimes a year more, sometimes a year less. Since we don’t want to randomly reassign people’s ages, I’ve fixed this. However, please note that this fix will apply only to RC entries that are added from now on, there are still entries in RC that show the age discrepancy. They should clear out over the next day or so, as age-corrected (but not necessarily better) entries are added to RC.

Hope everybody enjoys the end of their week,

The DiaryMaster

I like your little sidebar of humour, I think you should keep it. Sometimes I read your site updates even if they don’t apply to me just to see if you’ve slipped some humor in or something about the Diarymistress and D’Kids.

Now if it were only that easy to be a year younger!

Notes seem to disappear when you try to access them by person. I have yet to find a note dated 2004 when searching them by person. I specifically looked for a note from a certain diarist that I recieved today to test this, and the last note that it shows me receiving was from September 2003, and I have received several more since then.

Keep it! Keep it! =)

if you don’t keep the format, at least keep the Office Space references.

I like the sidebar. Good web site. Did you go to the Stapler Poetry section? Hilarious! Thanks 🙂

rock on mr dm!! isabel

i like it. keep it. humanizes you, ya know?

hahahahahaha office space! thats great! although you dont claim to read your noats often.. heres one just to say hello. so if you come across it, have a nice day 🙂

My interests still haven’t been posted on the Diary Interests page and there was nothing in them violating the rules. And I created them like 3 or 4 days ago. Please post them soon. Thanx! <3 Luv Alwayz <3 *~*Sara*~* *xoxo*

lol, you rarely, if ever, write like this. Kinda cool. Is virtualstapler a thing you got going on the side, n’est pas?

can you fix the diary search to give us notes from a person. we used to be able to set it to alphabetically list the note leavers. Now you cant do that or type in their name and find notes left.

hey now!! i have images of rerun on the brain now. NO FAIR! I say you should think of Shirley now for payback. Shirley cooking up greasy burgers while Rog is beating Dee down for telling all the girls that he likes them but he looks hideous in his tighty whities since he is nothing but a stick figure with silly glasses on.

I like the subtext box.

Hello Diary Master. I was curious if you will be adding a feature to delete sent notes and also if you would/could create a feature for smiling/sad/wink etc..faces. Thanks:)

What’s up with FOD? It would be nice if we had a little info on the problem. Thanks.

Hey, I like the little insert. very cool

I love the sidebar. You’re ever so much cooler now that uh…before. when things were bad. You even (usually) fix stuff before we know it’s broken. Sign me still impressed,

“Office Space” ruled……almost quasi-Oscar worth

TO report a rule violation wasn’t working the other day.

This entry, on an aesthetic level, is very nice. I say you should keep the right hand text box.

And milk is good for you!

I am really sorry to do this in a “note” but I can’t find the “help” menu. Please forgive my ignorance, lol! I have noticed a few issues the last few days. When I “leave notes”, the character number remains at 400, does not subtract. Also, When I type yo an entry and create “paragraphs”, or double space, it saves as one huge paragraph. Is it something that I am doing wrong? What can I do about it? Thank you for your time.

Thank you for letting me know this.

my top menu bar is totally white.I’m not sure if it’s my HTML or my computer.It used to pop up.Everyone else can see it when I show them.But I cant? It’s kinda freaking me out -Mind noting me back if you can think of anything? I cant do much without the menu.

I have somewhat of a problem. I paid for (2 years mistakingly) for an OD upgrade but I can’t remember the diary name I made. Can I apply that payment to my current diary?? *I dont know why I didnt in the 1st place* Any info is appreciated. Thanks

Lately I’ve been having problems getting onto fod. When I type in the address, my browser says it doesn’t exist. Any idea how I can fix this?

Will you pease note me back and tell me what “PayPal” is? is it the same thing as the gift subscribtion? does it cost ne money?Thanks.

i love that movie office space. it’s sooo hilarious. 🙂

Hey…I reported a problem with spacing on my entries to the email address given in the help bar, but have yet to receive a response… Can you tell me why my entries won’t space correctly? I hit enter to skip a line and to separate paragraphs, but once I save the entry, it all gets jumbled together…a few others have had this problem as well. Any suggestions? Thank you!!!! 🙂

You forgot the one where Sidestreet Sally asked when we’ll be able to post photos from our hard drives??? *hint-hint* 🙂

How the heck can I get an OpenDiary email address? Where do I go to use it? Is that something I would have to pay extra for? I’ve noted you several times asking how to get one, but have not recieved a response. I would appreciate one. Thanks,