User:Stephen Deken/Diary-X

Diary-X (commonly abbreviated dx) is the name of an online journaling service, which allows internet users to create and maintain a journal or diary online. While similar in form to other services such as LiveJournal, Diary-X attempts to encourage longer, more introspective entries in lieu of the shorter, link-heavy entries that are more prevalent on other services. Because of this, Diary-X never refers to itself as a blogging service -- it is instead a journaling service that happens to be online.

History
Diary-X was launched in June 2000 with a group of approximately 100 beta testers. The site went 'live' on August 7th, 2000, and immediately underwent significant growth. Signups compounded at an average of 1.25% per day for a year, ending in August 2001 with nearly 10,000 users. The growth continued at that rate until signups were closed in late 2002 due to support demands from Diary-X users outstripping what the sole administrator could provide.

When signups came back online in March 2003, they contained a roadblock which required users to wait a minimum of 12 hours before their accounts were activated. This functionality was created specifically to weed out people who were not interested in actually maintaining a journal (e.g., those users who were really looking for a blog host).

Today the site hosts approximately 120,000 journals, of which roughly 8,000 are being actively maintained. The site is also going through the process of open-sourcing its code and is moving toward a more community-directed design model.

Features
Diary-X features a fully-interactive templating system which allows users to specify the look and feel of their journal using raw HTML and CSS, or choose from one of the pre-built templates, from which they can specify a selected number of features, such as the colors.

The site intentionally limits the number of journal entries that may be displayed per page to exactly one. While this is seen by some as an irrational and ridiculous decision, it is intended to require the user to 'fill the page', hopefully with something insightful.

Community
The community aspect is less pronounced than among other sites like Xanga and LiveJournal, but the site offers a set of forums for social interaction and technical support. The community, on the whole, discourages txt talk and leet speak, in the belief that they are destoying the English language.

The Diary-X users refer to themselves as Diary-Xers or dxers.