Talking to your diary, notifications, and fonts
So, our Engineering team has been busy so there’s a bunch of fun things to let you know about:
Fonts and font sizes
We’ve also added a selector for changing fonts, so now it’s easy to make
big Georgia
little Tahoma
medium Arial Black
and so on. It’s easy, just select the text you want to change and then pick the font and font size in the dropdowns. (Please note – if you don’t see it, there is a second row of button on the entry editor toolbar – but it’s hidden until you click the button all the way at the right end of the first row. This button shows or hides the second row, and that’s where a bunch of additional formatting tools are.)
This is our first step towards allowing some customization on your diaries. We have had a lot of requests to let people change their colors and backgrounds in diaries as well. I will tell you that I am actively looking into this, and I am pretty sure we are going to do it – but it’s a bigger job and will take some time. When we do implement it, I plan to offer a way to switch it off (as the reader), so if you don’t want to see all the different colors, you won’t have to.
Oh and superscript and subscript too!
There’s new buttons for those on the second row of the editor too.
Notification history
You may have already noticed this, because we added it a few days ago – one of the problems with notifications before was that once you clicked them you couldn’t see them again. There’s now a link at the bottom of the notifications windows that will show you all your past notifications if you click it. This way, if you missed a notification about a reply or something, you can always find it again.
Talking to your diary
This is not something our engineers built, but it’s something that just works that I’ve been trying out recently. I’m not sure about Android phones, but on iPhones did you know you can speak your entries to type them? All you have to do is (on your phone):
- start writing an entry by clicking the write icon
- put the cursor in the editing windows
- click the microphone button on your phone keyboard (just like you do to talk to text, if you ever do that)
- and start talking!
Our editor will accept the voice input from your phone as you speak. Pretty cool.
Lots of new users
You may notice that there are more and more people showing up on the site. We have just started with a campaign to send out notification emails to the hundreds of thousands of users that were on the site in the “old” days (you may be here the last couple days because you received one of these) and let them know the site is back. We are sending a few thousand emails a day, so you should see a steady stream of your old friends showing up in the next few weeks 🙂
Whew! That’s all for tonight, but there’s more excitement coming!
Very awesome
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Awesome!
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I often use the iPhone microphone symbol to type my text for me, especially if I’m out and about and I can’t see the screen because of sunlight. I love this feature. The down side to the audio input is that it doesn’t take into account the ‘accent’ such as my ‘apparent’ aussie accent, which means that it will type something complete random rather than what I actually said. So annoying and pretty funny at the same time too.
It’s good that you continue to add features that people want, but I hope that it doesn’t create down time, or slow upload time because it’s got too much to think about before it all loads up.
Keep up the good work though! Good stuff. 🙂
G~
@agenieinabottle thanks! Performance is always our first goal, and improvements come after that!
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I built a template in the old days. I still use the same thing.  Thanks to you, I now have three blogs each using different coding styles. LOL
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It sounds like you and the team are working very hard to make this a good place that will require very little effort. Once again, thanks.
@dlk082244 you’re welcome!
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🙂
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Hi! Â Wouldn’t miss one of your entries for the world because it’s always full of exciting stuff. Â It’s so much fun to grow along with the new Open Diary and I’m just thrilled that I will be able to say I was a tester.
@wildrose_2 I’m so glad you were one of our testers!
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Yay!!!!! I like this update! Thank you for working on customization <3
@almostmrsbolen you’re welcome!
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RYN: Thank you!! I was so excited when I saw old messages starting to repopulate and older entries because there’s so much poetry that I shared here which I never archived offline and was rather devastated when it was lost. I only had myself to blame but OD is such a special place… Thank you and the OD team for bringing it all back!!! The best amnesia recovery experience!
@thelightinside you’re welcome! We are so glad to be back 🙂
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Dear DM
G’day from downunder.
On my wish list is a “Read Entry” feature. Maybe green dot for unread, and read or blue dot for entry read by me., against Friends list or other means., etc. What do you think? It might already be on your to-do list?
G~ 🤓
@agenieinabottle it is on our to-do list! It may be something that we have in the near future. Thanks!
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I no longer have the font option at all now.
@uncertaintragedy make sure you are seeing two rows of buttons on the entry editor – the fonts are on the second row. If you don’t see the second row, click the button all the way to the right on the first row of buttons, that will show it.
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I appreciate all your hard work, I am so glad to have come back right at the beginning of the site re-opening. It is so amazing to see all the updates happening and the site growing so quickly. Thanks for all your hard work & for being so communicative w/your users and taking feedback into consideration!
@cherrywine_1 you’re welcome and thanks for the very nice note!
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There’s an OD app? Or do you mean when you access the site from the web?
@sheetmusic I mean when you access it from the web – we will have an app someday in the future, but not yet.
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I’m really looking forward to the background colors. I know it sounds silly, but I simply don’t feel like I’m writing in my diary with a pastel violet background.
We didn’t have profile pictures on the old site, but Abbot Thayer’s “Winged Figure” has always been my avatar, sort of. It’s my profile picture now. And it doesn’t go–artistically or thematically–with this inoffensive purple-and-white color scheme.
The things I want to write about are…dark. But all I end up writing about are cats, and, honestly…it’s because I feel ridiculous trying to describe each gory chunk of my broken heart on a white background with violet borders.
@dolorangelicus that might be the best reasoning I’ve heard yet for customization, seriously.
@thediarymaster Would it be possible to do a quickie alternate site theme, just a little icon you can click to have a dark theme instead of pastel? I mean, I know this sounds silly…I keep saying that…and it does sound silly. The violet is lovely, and it seems to encourage “normal” entries from me. But those aren’t the entries I need to write; they aren’t the reason I need OD so much.
@dolorangelicus that’s one of the options we are considering, more to come soon 🙂
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I still can’t express my joy and gratitude that this website is back and better than ever. Like I really want to be crazy and melodramatic about because there really are no words =P
Thank you again and again. I am so happy to be back!
Is there any talk of bringing back the option to design and color each diary? Like how the background colors, font colors, etc used to be customize-able?
@setthecontrolz you’re welcome we are very excited too! We are evaluating ways to allow customization, we hope to do something in the future!
@thediarymaster sweet I knew you guys were going to kick as much but as you did years ago. No rush at all I’m just glad it’s on the table 🙂
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