bloodteethandflame

Evidently, Opendiary, a blogging website that had been around since 1998, is now gone.

This is significant in that I blogged there for over 10 years, and it would seem that any attempts that were made at backing up any of the diaries that were hosted there have malfunctioned.

All diaries have been deleted.

This is upsetting to a lot of folks.  A lot of diarists never backed up their diaries, unfortunately.

Mostly because backup attempts – the ever malfunctioning FCK editor/function backup – was easily corrupted.   And even if one had followed the prescribed and laborious set of steps that the FCK function required, there wasn’t any guarantee that the backup itself wouldn’t be corrupted.  FCK didn’t play very well with a lot of system platforms, or text programs.

One thing that Opendiary was infamous for was that the site was in a continual state of being ‘down.’    This was so often the case that there were several forums whose main function seemed to be to notify users as to whether or not OD (as it was called) was actually up and functioning on any given day.

And that went on for years.

I stopped blogging there in 2011, and came to WordPress.

While it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Opendiary was bound to die at some point…it still sucks to think that one of the first blogging sites of its kind could just disappear off the face of the Internet, rather than evolve with the Internet.

Why was Bruce Ableson (Able son, eh? How’s that for irony?) so *unable* to adapt to the changing face of Internet blogging?

According to Wikipedia, in 2008, there were 561,000 active users whose blogs were being hosted on the OpenDiary site.

Over a half million users on a website.  That is mind-boggling when you consider that the site was already 10 years old back then, and Mr. Ableson still hadn’t figured out how to keep his users happy.

He never did.   He never could.

One wonders why.

Maybe that’s why he gave up on February 7th, 2014, at 12:01 PM, and commenced to delete everything off the servers.

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Still, it is disappointing to consider that 10 years’ worth of writing that was being stored there is just …gone… now.

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And it would be even more ironic to think of him coming over to WordPress, or Weebly, or even LiveJournal (oh, there’s another dying blogging site), to brag about how he did The Web Log Thing  first, and yet, managed it all so poorly.

The man didn’t know what the hell he was doing, even though he was one of the first to do it.

You know what that is?

It’s a FCKing shame, that’s what it is.