Goodbye, Diary-X

Recently I’ve been fretting over what to do with this blog. As you probably know I used to have my blog on Diary-X, and only came over here after their server crash. I figured that I’d use this as an interim blog and go back to D-X once the site was running again and the server (and my data) was restored. But then I began to debate. I had all of my archives on Diary-X, but Blogger has an RSS feed. Diary-X keeps track of your site’s statistics, but Blogger lets me keep my journal on Mike’s website. I was going back and forth about it, but on Saturday night I found out that the decision had been made for me.

I was over at Mike’s apartment and he shouted from another room, “Hey, did you hear about Diary-X?”

I poked my head out of the computer room where’d I’d been checking my email. “No, what happened?” When I’d last checked the Diary-X page on Friday evening there still wasn’t word about how the recovery efforts were going.

“It’s gone,” Mike said.

“Gone? Like, done?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “All of it. There’s nothing left.”

I went back into the computer room and quickly went to the Diary-X page. Sure enough, the page said that the site was gone. All of it. Even the backups that had been performed in 2004 were faulty. I’d been keeping a blog there since 2003, and now there was nothing left of it. And not only that, the site itself was closing down.

It seems funny to grieve a blog, but I guess that’s what I’ve been doing. I suppose it’s no different than if someone spilled coffee all over your photo album and all your pictures were destroyed. Since I’d stopped keeping a personal journal in the spring of 2004 I had most of my memories on that blog and now it’s gone.

Well, most of it is gone. Pieces are still floating around. Mike offered to help me recover as much as I can. He has some, somehow, on his desktop, and Jen pointed me towards the Wayback Machine, a project that is slowly archiving the entire internet. It had archived four of my entries. I have a hunch that despite our best efforts, out of the hundreds of entries I wrote I’ll only get a dozen or two random ones back.

The thing I’m most upset about, though, is the blogs I’ll no longer read. Some people were nice enough to email me after the crash or I emailed them, but there were lots of people whose blogs I lurked on or whose addresses I didn’t have. Those people are lost. Thankfully Stephen Deken, who ran Diary-X, has started a database where you can leave your forwarding information, but who knows how many people will use that?

I still want to carry on with my journal because it’s become a surprisingly important part of my life. But it feels strange to be doing it here instead of there.