Dear e-diary

Ever since blogs have made an entrance in the cyber space, the traditional fancy hard-cover diaries have become somewhat extinct. Blogs serve pretty much the same purpose; you can write down your deepest thoughts and feelings without restraint. You can set the privacy level of your entries such that no one else has access to them. Moreover, blogs are password protected, so if you set the appropriate privacy level, you will never have to worry about hiding your diary from inquisitive siblings, cousins or friends who might be interested in perusing them.

No matter how efficient blogs might have become, diaries still have a certain charm. No blog can substitute the feeling of fulfilment that one experiences after taking out a hardbound diary from its hiding place after a long and tiring day and scribbling down a few lines in it. The paraphernalia from the everyday routine – a fun fair invitation or a mugshot photo — can be stuck with the entries to give them a more illustrative look. It is probably the charm still associated with the old-fashioned diaries that websites like www.deardiary.net are still functioning.

The creators have tried to create electronic counterparts of personal diaries and journals; however, the end result is no different from the various blogging sites present on the Internet. The website will only interest you if you are a die-hard critic of the word ‘blog’ and the vocabulary it has generated, such as blogosphere, blogoholic and blogger, to name a few.

Coming back to deardiary, the website is simple enough. All you have to do is to sign up for an account and start posting your entries. There is an option to lock your diaries so you can make full use of that feature if you do not intend to make your entries public.

The layout of diaries here is quite distinct and is a refreshing change from those of the blogging pages. While blogs have all the entries in reverse chronological order on one page, the diaries made at deardiary are quite different. When you click to view a diary, the main page shows a description of the diary to give you an insight into what that diary is all about. There is a menu at the top which you can follow to access different entries. There is even an option for random entries which you can select if you want to read any entry at random.

The rest of the features are quite usual. There is a commenting facility for your readers. Plus, you can post comments, change templates as you wish and of course you can also restrict users from posting comments if they get too annoying.

The website has two basic accounts — a plus account and a standard account. The plus account which has more features is a paid account, but the standard one can do the job quite well.

So, at the end of the day, you can still brag about writing a diary when in reality (or cyber reality), you are simply writing a blog. But hey, a blog is a diary anyway!

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To get your own personalised diary, log onto http://www.deardiary.net