The Book of OhLife
2014-09-23 17:44![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asher553It was a simple idea: an online journal that nobody else reads. They send you an email every day, and you type whatever's on your mind and hit reply. Their server stores all your entries, and you can go back and review them at your pleasure. (Or, if your diary makes you cringe as mine often does, displeasure.)
Is it secure? I imagine it's no more nor less secure than anything else you do via email and internet. If you are having an affair and your spouse works for the NSA, it's probably best to be prudent. But if you are a journaler, as I am, you've got to put your personal thoughts somewhere.
I liked the idea and signed up as soon as I heard about it. TechCrunch liked it too:
'It’s hard to believe, but in the days before blogging and Twitter plenty of people still found a way to record the personal (and sometimes mundane) details of their daily lives. But instead of sharing them with the world, they simply jotted them down in a book kept hidden in the sock drawer or under a pillow. Turns out, the personal journal is still alive and well, and now Y Combinator-funded startup OhLife thinks that it can make it even more popular by bringing it to your inbox. ...'
But I'm idiosyncratic and tend like different things from what the bulk of the population like; and in this case, there just weren't enough users to keep the project economically viable. So the personal journal may still be "alive and well" but OL is not, and the Book of OhLife will be sealed for good this Yom Kippur.
But OL got me in the habit of writing daily journal entries on my computer (and, eventually, printing them out - I have a big archive of binders now) and I will probably continue that habit here at DW.
One of the things I've found inconvenient about DW (as compared to LJ) is they don't support uploading pictures directly. But maybe that can be a good thing? After all, a journal is about words.
Is it secure? I imagine it's no more nor less secure than anything else you do via email and internet. If you are having an affair and your spouse works for the NSA, it's probably best to be prudent. But if you are a journaler, as I am, you've got to put your personal thoughts somewhere.
I liked the idea and signed up as soon as I heard about it. TechCrunch liked it too:
'It’s hard to believe, but in the days before blogging and Twitter plenty of people still found a way to record the personal (and sometimes mundane) details of their daily lives. But instead of sharing them with the world, they simply jotted them down in a book kept hidden in the sock drawer or under a pillow. Turns out, the personal journal is still alive and well, and now Y Combinator-funded startup OhLife thinks that it can make it even more popular by bringing it to your inbox. ...'
But I'm idiosyncratic and tend like different things from what the bulk of the population like; and in this case, there just weren't enough users to keep the project economically viable. So the personal journal may still be "alive and well" but OL is not, and the Book of OhLife will be sealed for good this Yom Kippur.
But OL got me in the habit of writing daily journal entries on my computer (and, eventually, printing them out - I have a big archive of binders now) and I will probably continue that habit here at DW.
One of the things I've found inconvenient about DW (as compared to LJ) is they don't support uploading pictures directly. But maybe that can be a good thing? After all, a journal is about words.
