Frequently Asked Questions

About this site
Welcome to the my-diary.org FAQ page. If you cannot find an answer to your question here, please contact us

A diary, or journal, is a tool that is utilized to keep records of experiences, goals, memories and much more. There are many reasons to use a diary but there is only one outcome, self-improvement! All it takes is a bit of initiative.

Keeping a diary is a very therapeutic way to process thoughts and emotions. It can be a great way to help with recovery, important life decisions, and even someday be a wonderful hand-me-down thanks to our convenient backup capabilities.

my-diary.org is designed to let the words do the talking! It isn't about fancy fonts and distracting colors. Your truth should be raw and sometimes maybe even ugly.

This diary allows you to write privately or publicly! You can find solace in solitude and/or joy in connecting with others. Not only do we offer you a safe place to document your life and a healthy outlet, we offer a community of people to relate and talk to on a deeper level.

The design and layout are meant to relax you and let your mind roam freely. No visual overloads here! Add a link to your website, set reminders, follow other diary writers and receive notifications for what others have written. You can also see how many followers you have.

Start your diary today. It's free!

Profile pictures are reserved for active subscribers and some legacy users. You can subscribe under "Account" after logging in.
After you have logged in, you can change stuff on the account-page. This is also where you delete your diary.
Make sure your entered your email-address correctly, and that you are accepting email from my domain "my-diary.org". Also, you can check your "junk email" folder.
You can update your diary as often as you like. If you don't want to update it often, that's fine too. There are no requirements.
GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) or UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is the standard time common to every place in the world. The entries are stored with timestamps in UTC. A feature that lets you display it in your local timezone is available.
The site is primarily written in PHP, with MySQL as the database PHP - MySQL.
You can contact me via the contact page or email to support Contact form
The first version was up in august 2000. In the beginning of october 2000, my-diary.org was registered, and the site moved here.
The passwords are automatically generated. You can change the password under the 'Account' page after logging in.
You can reset your password here.

If your diary is set private, it won't be listed in the public section, and you need the email-address and password to be able to view your diary.

The mixed setting allows you to have both private and public entries, and only the ones made public are visible to others

You can set your diary public or private under 'Account' after logging in
For now, the diaries will only contain pure text. At some point, some basic formatting options might be added.
Currently the uploading of images to your profile is only available to members who are subscribers. This is because all images need to be approved manually.
After you have logged in, if you have any messages, there will be notification on the first page after you have logged in. You can also optionally receive email or push notifications when you get messages.
If you are a non-english speaker, you can help with translations on the translate-page after you have logged in. The service is absolutely free to use, but you can also subscribe or donate to the site here :
https://www.my-diary.org/donate/
Cookies are used to track user preferences, and to manage some features while you are logged in at my site. You can read more about cookies here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie
You can read some of what the users think about this on this page Articles and testimonials
Unfortunately, the site needs to make more money to pay for expenses related to the hosting and maintenance, and the income from ads and user subscriptions go towards that.

I ran the site without ads at all for many years, and paid for all out of my own pocket. However, times changes, and now the site has to make money to pay for the service it provides.

It's unfortunate, but there's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone has to pay the bills. By allowing ads, you're earning the site money. If the ads are unacceptable to you, then you can donate or subscribe. This allows you to turn off ads from within the site itself (for the duration of the subscription/donation).

Hopefully, we will get to a point where ads are not necessary.
You cannot see who your followers are, and other people can't see that you follow them
We use a lot of different networks for advertising. Some of these are: