Good Bye Open Diary

              Well I guess it is official that Open Diary is finally going to die. For the past few months I thought things were actually improving. I moved to prosebox with my same “brickpaver” name, and did some posting there when OD was in the death throes a few months back. As a new site it did not have the “feeling of home” or community I enjoyed on OD.

I know a lot of my friends at Open Diary are already on Prosebox. I have all my entries and notes downloaded from Open Diary to October 2013. It is impossible to navigate the site now. Pretty much all my entries were written in Word and are filed in yearly folders on my hard drive. When the site was “hacked” in 2004 and I lost months of entries on line, I was so glad to have saved them to my Word files.

When OD was actually functioning last week I was reading through my early entries. It was sad to click on notes left by long gone diarists in those early days to get the message, “the page you requested no longer exists”.  One diarist in particular left some very troubling entries and then just up and vanished. I often wonder if he took his life. There was never any answer to notes left on his diary. Years ago his diary was purged.  

As I type this out Open Diary is down. (1:30 p.m. 1/27/2014) I so want to get a last entry out and notes to my friends with contact information and an invitation to move to Prosebox.

I’ll post this entry to Prosebox which looks to be my new “journal home”. I held up developing my homepage there. Looks like I have my work cut out for me.

This is so sad. Open Diary has truly had an effect upon my life. If it had not been for my early writings I never would have gone to college back in 2003. I’ve made such friends and connections from all over the world who have seen me through both good times and bad through this site. I’m sure there is a lot behind the scenes here regarding the demise of this wonderful site we will never be privy to. I’m thankful for the time Open Diary was here for me and it is with a heavy heart I say good bye.  

I have to close this entry with some absurdity which is so entwined in my life. Earlier today, Anne from Credit Card Services called me to lower my interest rates. I clicked “1” to get a representative. I’m thinking I was talking to Michael and told him I have a balance of some $15,000 on my card. This keeps these spammers on the line and fishing for information. When this person asked who he was speaking to I replied that my name was Rufus so when he asked my last name I could say “Leaking”!!  Get it????   Rufus Leaking!!

This man said, “No, this is supposed to be Mr “Whatever’s” account, I’m sorry but your rates will go up now!” and he then hung up! I never knew a spammer could have such control on my credit card! Next time I think I’ll use the name Ben Dover.