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Friday, Aug. 19, 2005 / 8:36 p.m. ~Diaryland Gold Has Lost its Luster~ My Diaryland Gold Membership is up for renewal, and for the first time I'm considering letting it go. I never imagined I'd prefer LiveJournal, but I do. They have a team of administrators, programmers, developers who are constantly working on the site and improving it, and Diaryland seems to have lapsed into a virtual coma. Nothing on Diaryland has changed in years - it's been abandoned. The design is exactly the same, the options are exactly the same, the features have stagnated like some centuries old pond with little but scum floating atop it. There is no help feature - support requests are ignored. The only 'news' passed on to the community at large is about the creator of the site, one "Andrew", and his personal life, his marriage, his new baby, and the occasional down time the site experiences, as if he's never even aware there is a web site called Diaryland until the site goes down and no one can post an update. Then, he claims, he works feverishly to get it all back up and running, through a series of phone calls to technical people, or at least this is what he posts through his 'news updates'. Attempts to contact him are futile, attempts to seek help through the official 'support requests' channel are futile, yet my email inbox is inundated with automated email notices informing me my Gold Membership is close to expiring, and how many days I have left until I lose all the fine amenities afforded me, unless I shell out another $20 for SIX MONTHS! Yeah? Well I no longer need Diaryland's image hosting, I use PhotoBucket, and it's FREE! And if I'm never updating this thing, why should I care if I lose images on my layout? Or if I lose my layout altogether? [Edited to add: I just deleted most of my Diaryland hosted photos, several years' worth of accumulated images posted in this diary and elsewhere, and it makes me really sad to do it, but unfortunately there is no easy way to find the photos and link them to updated uploads at another photo hosting site. Suffice to say it's time for a change, and I'm purging a bit. Again, never thought I'd do it, but I'm reevaluating money spent, and it's no longer worth the money. Sad.] This site is a wasteland, though I notice plenty of people are still using it. LiveJournal is far superior. Much more room for creative expression through layouts, and much more interaction with the 'comments' feature. It has a real community feel, and I like that. With the use of the 'friends page' on LJ, lumping all of the reading list entries on one page, the entries need to be shorter, and the attention spans of the users are much shorter, but it's worth it to know that the customer service is good, and the site is being monitored and updated, upgraded regularly. A bit of thinking out loud here, but I'm just wondering if this is worth it anymore, to me, at all. I suppose it may be time to consider saving all my entries to Word, and shutting it down. And this is no plea for anyone to respond at all, to say, "Oh no, please don't", yada, yada, yada, I'm just saying I don't see the point of being here anymore, and the lack of service is like the last straw, as if I needed the impetus to just give it up. I've made some entries 'private', and my 'private folder' is unreadable, inaccessible, though I've gone in with correct password I see empty pages. The archive for the private entries I have labeled as such in the past is totally broken. I click on the regenerate link over and over, a few times a week, to no avail. Is there really one person running this site? So he got married, he had a child, if he is too busy to care for this site, he should sell it. Give it away, anything. Hire some help maybe. Where is my Gold Membership money going? To pay for his kid's preschool? You get me? I have poured years' worth of my life into this thing, but then people I know in 'real life' began reading, some at my invitation, others decidedly not, and I lost my comfort zone. I no longer want to write about private aspects of my life, nor write here about very much at all, really, it's too wide open, I feel too exposed, and without interaction it's a total exercise in exhibitionism, which, believe it or not, no longer interests me. If I don't get some technical support, and soon, we'll just let the membership lapse, see what it's like to do this for free, and see what it's like to give it up altogether. Diaryland Gold has lost its luster. Cost of the War in Iraq
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