Ronnie

Diary-X was a blogging community created by Stephen Deken. He was our hero. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary-X) I joined in 2002 and still have contact with some of my followers. The hosting was free but had a premium component that allowed some extra features (like custom avatars, etc.) and all fees went to the host. It was a very grass-roots community. There was a forum for chatting between bloggers, and a large number of us were friendly. We had custom site design that was easy for a novice to develop, posting via email, commenting. I haven't really seen anything like it since. WordPress doesn't come close. After the server crashed for the last time in '06, and the owner couldn't afford to bring it back, some of the members tried to bring up a new community but we couldn't pull it together. I will include some screen shots of that attempt, called Codexed. We were able to retrieve our blog entries and I had a backup of my template because I had customized it in a text file. I moved to another host and bought a domain, but the sense of community was lost. I gave up blogging entirely in 2015. I miss that space to vent and keep track of my thoughts while interacting with a kind, no-troll group of peers. It was great for my mental health and some of the struggles I was going through at the time. I wrote my first novel in Diary-X. (This was 2003, before cloud services was a common thing.)