Happy 5th Birthday Open Diary

Hello everybody,

Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about writing this entry the last couple of days – and now that I’m actually writing it, I find that it is somewhat wrong. See, I’ve had it in my head (and told everybody else when asked) that Open Diary was started on October 25th, 1998 – five years ago today.

As part of this entry, I wanted to repost my first entry (the first entry ever in OD), so I went looking for a copy of it tonight. I knew that it didn’t exist anymore on our servers – it was long ago removed by my own archiving programs, since the diary it was in was no longer active. I had an electronic copy of that first diary in a Word file, saved before I had removed the diary from the system. After searching three of the computers I’ve used in the past five years, I found that – but also found that I had at some point deleted the first entry from that electronic version (probably thinking it pointless and unnecessary).

Finally, thanks to the DiaryMistress, I found a paper copy of it (bless paper – not so whimsically deleted by the press of a button) – she had printed it out and filed it away for posterity back in the day. Anyways, to get to the point (there is one, hold on) – when I pulled that printed copy out of the file, and looked at the date on it, it was October 19th, not the 25th. I don’t know when in my mind the two dates got switched around, but it was long enough ago that I thought I’d always believed the 25th was the date.

In any case, the fifth birthday of OD passed us by a few days ago, without a mention. I had been planning on making this birthday entry, so here it is, a few days late.

Five years is a Long Time. I realized that even more tonight, reading that first entry and the entries that I wrote in the months following (I used to actually write in my diary, not about the latest upgrades or fixes, but about my life). I’m a different person now than I was five years ago, and Open Diary is a different place than it was – that’s for sure.

Anyways, I was thinking back to when Open Diary first went online five years (and a few days) back. I was working in a contract programming job for a large corporate client, writing financial reporting software. For those of you who know little of programming, or financial reporting, or large corporations – when placed together, these things did not equal excitement. Don’t get me wrong – it was a good job, and paid the bills, but my team and I often found ourselves with extra time on our hands. Not to show conceit or anything, but we were good programmers, and what we were being asked to do wasn’t rocket science – so we sometimes found ourselves finished with the day’s tasks before we had finished with the day. As many countless millions had found before and since, extra time + large corporate-style fast web connection = pointless web surfing when you should be doing something more productive.

Except my web surfing turned into something else. One day, I stumbled across an online journal. It was being updated by an 18 year-old guy, who had run away from a drunk-driving conviction in Alabama, and was travelling across the country. At the time I read his journal, he was working on a ranch in Nevada, until he had enough money to continue on. I found that reading about somebody else’s life held a certain fascination, especially when they were living a life that was diametrically opposed to what I lived (like working on a ranch, outside in the sunshine, under an alias).

After reading this diary for awhile, I found that there were others out there on the Net. Each one told a unique story, some fascinating, some pedestrian, but each one representing the collected experiences of a real person. After spending some time stumbling around the web looking for more journals, an idea slowly emerged – if I liked reading online journals, others would too. And if there was one place where these journals were gathered together and easy to find, so much the better. I also realized that all the people keeping journals online in 1998 had to have their own server space and had to know how to construct a web page – which limited the demographics of people keeping online journals to people with at least some degree of geekiness (not that there’s anything wrong with that) in their personality.

Therefore (went my theory), if there was a web site where people could keep a diary online, without needing to know HTML or have their own web space – and if that place made it easy for readers to browse the diaries and find ones that interested them – that might be a place that people would find interesting or even useful. I thought about this theory for a few weeks, turned it over and looked at the undersides of it, and figured it was worth pursuing.

I will always remember the day I told the DiaryMistress about the idea of Open Diary. She had come to visit me at my corporate job during lunch, and it was a pleasant spring day. We went to a local arboretum to sit in the sun and eat. I told her what I was thinking. (Five years ago, the idea of Open Diary was not one that made people say “that’s a cool idea”, or “I wish I’d thought of that”, but usually got a perplexed look followed by “why would anybody want to keep a diary where other people can read it?”) I must give the DiaryMistress credit – she was positive about the idea, and encouraged me to go further.

That was followed by several months of coding, writing what would become Open Diary 1.0 (although it was never known by that number). I continued to work full-time (plus) in the programming job, while developing Open Diary on nights and weekends. This first version was written on a PC that now sits in a closet in my basement, using ASP (learned that from the corporate job) and Microsoft Access for the database. (Those of you who know programming and databases may be surprised, but yes, OD ran on Access for quite a few months after it first started.) During that time, my computer sat on a table in our bedroom – it was warmer than downstairs, and I could at least pretend I was spending time with the DiaryMistress when I was coding at two in the morning.

Finally, on October 19th (not the 25th), the software was ready to be released to the world outside of our bedroom. By the time I had put the finishing touches on it, it was after midnight – and I copied the code up to our first web server. The thrill of pulling that front page up in a web browser and seeing my site (knowing that thousands of others could do the same) was something I’ll remember for a long time.

I started a diary, authorcode number A100001, and titled it “Better Than a Poke in the Eye”. I don’t remember where the name came from. By the time I was ready to type the first entry, it was after 2 a.m., so my writing was (perhaps) not brilliant.

Here is what that first entry looked like:

After hitting the Save button, I looked at the front page – which reported that Open Diary was the home to exactly (1) online diary. I hit Refresh a few times, and the number stayed the same – one. I’m not sure what I expected, but I went to bed.

(continued…next entry)