Diary Communities

Hello everybody,

Subject lines of e-mails I’ve received today:

alumni inferring chamois irretrievable claw

allay bitterroot nevertheless parsimony

aeronautic breadwinner saucy sagacity

gerhard hoagie honeydew heterogeneity

This is the beauty of randomly-generated spam mail, where subjects are composed by a computer to try to make them look like real mail. Seems to me there’s a word game in here somewhere – there’s got to be something funny when “saucy sagacity” and “hoagie honeydew” appear.

Is this the natural progression of the “a million monkeys pounding on a million typewriters for a million years will reproduce Shakespeare” argument? Will I eventually get e-mail with subjects like “What a piece of work is man” or “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”?

Little did I know, researchers at the University of Plymouth tried a little experiment to test the monkey theory – with interesting results. When given a computer, they found that macaques were more predisposed toward smashing it with rocks and using it for a toilet, than for creating literature.

Who would have guessed?

Today I am taking the first step to putting the new Diary Communities section online. This is something I talked about a little while ago as a prototype in this entry.

The initial set of communities are based on either age groups or geographic locations. If you have set your age or geographic location in your diary, you will automatically be a member of the appropriate community. Future expansion will add communities that will work like (and eventually replace) the current diary circles – you will be able to join them voluntarily, and have your entries appear in them.

Being a member of a community does not remove you from the rest of OD. This is something that you are in addition to being a regular OD member. If your entries are showing up in a community, this does not mean that they are missing from Open Diary – they will show up there as well, just as they always have.

To get to the communities, click the “Find Authors” menu and then “Diary Communities”. Clicking on one of the community names will take you to the front page for that community. The community front pages look like the regular front page, but only diaries from members of that community are displayed. You will see a box in the left-side menu with the name of the community you are in, and two links.

To return to regular Open Diary, where you see all diaries, click the “OD main page” link. This will return you to the usual OD front page.

From the community front page, several functions work with community members – Random, Search, Diary Indexes, Reader’s Choice, and Recent Entries will all display only entries from the currently selected community. This setting will last until you either close your browser, or return to regular OD by clicking the “OD main page” link I mentioned above.

I’ll be adding some custom color schemes (something I’m not good at – takes me a lot of fiddling) to each community, to help them look different. There will be other things coming as well – this is only the beginning.

Addendum: Every time I add something to the menus like this, I get several notes from people who don’t see it. If you don’t see “Diary Communities” on the menu, press the Refresh button on your browser to reload the menu. It will show up then.

The DiaryMaster

that is totally uncool. you just mentioned sauce, hoagies, and honeydew in one entry to the lady who is puking her guts up every day. IM HUNGRY!! Please refrain from abusing your customers in this fashion. 😉

This is an awesome idea *goes to check it out*

I think saucy sagacity is hilarious!

I tried refreshing and still don’t see the new diary communities link.

You may want to keep the circles active for people who don’t want to permanently join a topic, but who have one entry that they would like to share on a particular thing.

Obsequious obstetrican!

Hey, sorry this is totally unrelated to your entry, but anyways, one of the adverts on this site is a Test your IQ advert, I clicked on it, assuming it was one of those survey things, the first page tells you all about how you can find out your IQ etc etc, no mention that it might not be free! SO I clicked to test and a page came up which said loading, then the page loaded ready for me to take….

…the test when I realised that I wasnt connected to my usual ISP, it had silently dialed up to a premium rate number!! I just wanted to let you know so you could maybe warn other people, and also to ask if you knew anyway I could contact them, unsurprisingly there is no contact email, and I kinda wanna complain! 🙂 Thanks x

That’s awesome! 😀 @–}— <3 Luv Alwayz <3 *~*Sara*~* *xoxo*

hope u have a great week mr dm!! isabel

I have been wondering how to put photographs on my diary front page as well as my entries? I’ve tried copy/paste, but I’m afraid that I am technologicaly illiterate.

this community thing sounds neat. Can’t you make one that’s called “Europe”? =D

Hey I just went to Know why You can’t delete Entry’s from TOD.

few questions, mostly for clarification’s sake… this community idea is similar to communities on LiveJournal, yes? if we join a community, do our entries automatically show up in said community, or is that optional as well? will diarists be able to create and maintain their own comunities about theire own interests at some point? thanks 🙂

oh, and one last thing, can we leave a community once we join one?

Sorry to bug you with errors (or is that error you with bugs?). Anyway. If I go to an entryview page and click “edit this entry” I get the following error in an Windows XP IE6 browser: Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www.opendiary.com/entrychange.asp?mode=edit&entrycode=10783&viewmode=date. Operation aborted It happens every time I try to edit an entry. —}cont’d …

… However! Clicking OK then brings up “Page not found”, but clicking “back” takes you to the edit page, and allows you to proceed as normal. Most strange!

Just wondering, what’s a reader’s password? Note me ASAP!!

When I write an entry, I don’t get the little tool bar type thing where you can change the font, font color, paragraphing etc! Why not? I use windows 98 and I am on Msn explorer internet if that has anything to do with it. thanks.

Hi. I was wondering if you could tell me how to put a “sidebar” into my entries, such as you use to separate your personal commentary/entry from the official “business” of the entry. If there is a quick and easy way to do this, let me know. I’m not afraid of html, and I could probably hack some way that would work, but I want it to look pretty… Thanks!

You probably have hundreds of other anonymous notes about this, but: when I click on the “Main Page” button from the Community: Twenties box on the left, it doesn’t clear the cookie or whatever – even logging out of my diary and back in doesn’t. I’m stuck in the Community page until this is fixed…

Just want to say thank you for the communities! It’s a great idea, I was having trouble last night finding people in my age range, this is just what I needed!!