How’s it going on the New OD Survey #1

This isn’t related to UI/UX… but I have noticed on a few occasions slow response times on the site.  I don’t know what your back end servers are.  But perhaps better use of load balancing to handle the traffic hiccups.  The site is growing quickly maybe faster than you anticipated, so some hiccups are to be expected with the increased network traffic.

I also did really like being able to customize my diary on the previous site, it gave each person’s page some unique flavour.  Although it is not necessary, just a nice to have.  Everything else is good, keep up the good work!

I don’t really know if I have many suggestions on adding things, other than editing notes. I enjoy and appreciate the simplicity of OD. I do miss some of the old formatting options with backgrounds and such but honestly as longs as I get to semi-anonymously pound out my thoughts I am happy. I am so deeply grateful you brought this back to us.

The ability to mark somebody as a favorite without necessarily inviting them to like me back. Sometimes I just want to lurk. 🙂

The ability to edit a note is a big one! I really miss having a custom front page on my diary; not too bothered about colours/designs but I would like to write my own intro. I’d also like to see some logical order to the chapter lists. And the ability to easily change the status of entries perhaps by chapter? It’d be quite useful to be able to make all the entries in a chapter friends only or private in one go. Otherwise, I’m happy with the new features and glad to see the circles bulking back up again! Overall, I’m so happy this community is back 🙂 I know I’ve said it before, but (to use a British phrase) I’m chuffed to bits!

just popping in to say I’m grateful OD is back. <3

I very much prefer OD to Prosebox, but one thing I loved on Prosebox was the little window that gave me a preview of something I had written previously. It was a sort of “on this day”, but with entries. So if I logged on to write an entry I was shown something I’d written on or around the same date in the past and it often encouraged me to go read the full entry. I’d love to see this feature here.

When you click on your own profile / activity / friends, you are able to see details about interactions your friends are having with other folks on the site, including private notes they may leave. I don’t leave or receive a lot of private notes, but I do find being able to see others private things a little disconcerting. I would have no issues if this feature was deleted.
I’d also love to see a return of Readers Choice.
I’m really loving OD’s return . Keep up the great work.

To me the color and other customization stuff is not important.

I might like seeming more people on front page.

I would like to have the calendar back, especially if it included my old entries.  No doubt that would be a big job.

Thanks for all you’ve done.  It works fine.  Again I was so happy to see my old entries, a lot of them still with their pictures.

Just want to say I am so grateful OD is back!

It’s been fun looking back through all of my old entries.

I would like to edit notes.

I also have some issues that if I go back in to an entry to correct something and have some pictures that I have put in by URL, I lose those pictures when I hit edit, and have to go back and past the URL in… I don’t know if I lose pics that have been uploaded, just the URL ones, I believe.  Am I doing something wrong there?

I’m also pleased with the way OD is advancing.  You and all the team have been so attuned to getting this off on the right foot.  I am enjoying it and enjoying the people  I interact with.  Thanks for making it possible.  I will just take the improvements as they come, and if anything becomes terrifically important, I will let you know.

I hope the response speed can be improved. Some friends blame that the site is too slow which make them hesitate to keep on using OD.

I better way to go back and see entries. One of my friends I can only see about half of her diary? I would like to navigate to the beginning of mine. Didn’t it used to have pages so you could click around page page 1 (end of diary) and say page 5 and see a few months ago or say page 48 to get to the beginning. Am I making sense?

omg, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for bringing Open Diary back!!!

Is there any plan – or possibility- for bringing back pictures that were in old entries? Speaking as a picture-heavy diarist!

So tell me, are you finding Open Diary to bring out your creative self?  I bet that you are.  So many wonderful things to look forward to.

Dear Diary Master,

Thank you very much for your great efforts to resurrect Open Diary, for importing our old diaries and for making this community a great place to be enjoyed.

Kindly inform me how to upload pictures on OD.

Thanking you very much in anticipation.

With kind regards and best wishes.

If I would add any feature (and I know this seems to be unpopular), I would bring back the customization options. One of my favorite things to do on old OD was come up with decorative themes for my diary with my best friend, sometimes we would decorate each other’s diaries, and pick out pictures and colors and patterns to go along with whatever theme would could come up with. It was an important part of the experience to me and something I miss a lot. It was also wonderful to go through random diaries and see all the many wonderful forms of self-expression, like examining a giant imaginative quilt.

I’m lazy and didn’t scroll through your 400,000 notes.  Has anyone said “Reader’s Choice” yet?

I do miss the customization of the front page that we had a before, it was so much fun back in the day. However, I barely have time to actually write let alone sit and do all of that, but the option would be nice. I miss the random button.

Seconding the requests for the ability to edit notes, and the calendar. I loved the old calendar feature! Also, I’d like to be able to select a chapter and read through only those entries. How about an undo button for editing entries? And I cannot seem to figure out how to change my profile description. The paragraph that talks about who I am. There’s a typo in there I need to fix.

Thanks DM!

I noticed often if I post an entry and then go to edit the entry soon after (Usually I discover a spellling/grammatical error and that just can’t happen!!! lol) when I go to save it, I receive a 403 error.  I find this can be reproduced more often than not.   Not sure why the webserver is telling me I can’t write to my own diary.  Just a heads up.  Keep up the good work! 🙂

Another request, the ability to “like notes/entries”  sometimes somebody says something you agree with.  A like would reduce redundant comments in posts, making for a cleaner interface.  But also sometimes you just want to let people know you read the entry comment, without responding.

How do you add pictures to your entries? I am so glad od is back

As was already mentioned numerous times, and you have addressed you are already working to get it added, my main thing would be to have note editing added, always feel like a goober, when I hit add note w/out proof reading and then see my spelling/grammar errors cemented there in the notes. lol

Maybe an option to “like” notes left by readers, that way if you do not necessarily have anything to write back you could like the comment so that the reader knows you saw it? Just an idea.

I miss “empty” notes, where you could just leave your name to show that you’d read and were there even if you couldn’t think of the right words to say.

Thank you very much for bringing back the OD.

Will you be adding Lifetime Memberships again?  I always meant to buy one…

Will you be adding a backup function so we can have a copy of our writing?

For me, the navigation is still the biggest detriment to me wanting to be on the site or feeling like it’s easy to use – the front page of my own diary is kind of hard to navigate. I like to browse through old entries within the past few weeks and it’s hard because there’s no ‘next page’ link.  A calendar view will also be REALLY awesome once we get that.

-I’d also (and I know you’re working on this) really like the ability to see a list of unread entries by friends (although the ‘latest entry’ sort is a lot easier to use than what we had before).

-In general I find the amount of options in the profile a bit overwhelming. What exactly goes in the activity log?   What exactly triggers notifications?

-Related to navigation and the above, if the profile (and maybe the ‘my diary’) link could just be their own icons (instead of the drop down) that would make things a bit more streamlined. Or maybe make the picture of me a link to either my diary or my profile which saves you a little space and saves me a click :). Honestly, I wouldn’t mind having the Friends List and Notes as icons too.

Editing notes would be a big one. Also, it would be amazing if there were a quick and easy link to add pictures to notes and especially entries.

Can we change the privacy on individual chapters? I can’t seem to work out how to do that…

what you are working on already has been key for me.   also when searching for folks, if it didn’t have to be an exact match, that would be great.

oh and an option to follow but not friend

Sounds like you are already working on what I would like to happen.

Yeah, being able to customize is a nice thing, but…. eh. Maybe because I’m an old fart now it doesn’t matter. I love the fact you can put a picture at the beginning of the entries. Imho I think that is the best way to customize your stuff 🙂

Chapters –
How do you actually see all the entries in a chapter? It only loads the first six or so, and then even though it looks like it wants to load more (I see a spinning circle)…nothing.

When I look at my chapter list, I can only sort by name, or by “Entries” – is there a way to pick the order? They used to be chronological in OD and I had specified an order.

Speaking of the sort – Sorting by “Entries” did not appear to actually sort by number of entries. It just seemed to randomize them.

I think others have asked this, but some kind of mass update tool would be really useful – such as creating a new chapter and adding entries en masse, or a tool to update privacy statuses, etc.

Last question – kind of dumb – but if I delete a chapter, that’s just deleting the chapter itself, right? Not the entries inside it?

It has been 6 years since I left OD. I left because life got to sad to write anymore. I did not want to admit my defeat.

I just read some post about people who paid for a lifetime membership not paying the monthly fee now. I remember paying for something way back… but I do not remember what???? Can you check into that for me? It may have been a 1 year thing instead of lifetime. It was a lifetime ago so I do not remember.

I think everything is going wonderfully so far!

The only feature that I would like to see again, and I think if I remember past entries it is already in the cards for the future, is a feature to sort/assign/recategorize multiple diary entries at the same time. I don’t think I am describing it correctly, but I know in the old OD system, there was a system to ‘edit’ multiple entries, and we could just click boxes to change them from whatever we had them set at, to something else (‘public’ to ‘friend’s only’ etc.) And if I remember correctly, we could also use the same feature to move an entry to a different ‘chapter’ we created.

In the grand scheme of things, this feature is not all that important compared to everything else being worked out – I am just really glad OD is back!

I don’t know if someone else already commented on this,  But now that I have been playing around with Open Diary for a couple of days one of the things that is irritating is that “notes” and “mentions” are separate.  It seems that I am more frequently looking for “mentions.”

Maybe this could show up first instead of notes?

Put me in the anti-customization column.  I wouldn’t mind being able to change fonts and especially font SIZE (for those of us with older eyes), but I like the simplicity of being able to read different diarist without all the crazy colors and pattern changes.  Just seems so much more cohesive this way.

One other thing I would really like to see, though, is the ability to search for diarists by categories.  I seem to remember there was a way to search by age groups and/or locations. I like being able to drop in on voices from around the world and from different stages in life.

I like the idea of customizations but I wouldn’t want to get all involved with using html and css to completely override the UX. I learned html and css initially to do custom layouts on this site…lol. I kinda miss just having the old color picker.

One thing Steve did over at Bloop was code in a “de-customize” on the visuals. So if a user couldn’t read a diarist’s entries, they could click that button, and for the user it would strip out the special styles and show the default color scheme.

I’d also like the ability to change my @handle. I could see where that would get messy with auto-redirects and eventual overlapping but it would be nice.

The “Chapters” for our diaries are showing up in alphabetical order which makes absolutely zero sense from a storytelling perspective.  I definitely think this needs to be changed.  I also remember there being some kind of bulk editor in the old OD where you could mass change entries’ chapters etc. That would be a nice feature as I wish I didn’t have any chapters currently since they show up in alphabetical order.

Hi, this may be a dumb question (I ask a lot of them) but is there a way to see a table of contents on all diary entries, including the old ones? I cannot for the life of me find the index page like you used to have on the old version. If you could point out where it is and how to get there, I would be most grateful.

I am very technology illiterate, but it seems odd to me that you are unable to add things to the new OD that you had already mastered on the old OD.

I never sit and write an entry all the way through. I save it as a draft and come back to it several times. Why do copies of each edit save?

Is there a way to back up/easily download my diary? I just transferred a dozen or so entries from another site, deleting as I went….so I’m just wondering if that’s on your list of future projects.

Loving being back here, even though there’s only a couple of my old friends here … but new friends to be made!

The only thing I’m missing is being able to search for people by gender, age, country – like, I used to be able to search for all the diaries by women in the UK in their 40s (where they’d specified those things). Now it seems the only way to find people is through browsing all the new entries or if you already know their username. Will anything be changing there?

I know I am a bit late on reading back on the entries of yours that I have missed but I was wondering if you all would consider making a downloadable app in the future? That would help when we are offline, and maybe we could customize our diaries there with colors and whatnot but have it only viewable to ourselves and that way everyone could agree on customizations. And the ones who like to set an atmosphere for our writings can and the ones who don’t like it dont have to customise theirs?

I’d like to see the ability to add a sitemeter like we could on the old OD.