My OU Student Blog and WordPress became my enduring platforms for writing in 2010; before that, there'd been Diaryland.
I began using Diaryland in September 1999. On my birthday, to be exact.
At first Diaryland was simply an online extension of something I’d already done for decades: keep diaries. But it quickly became much more. It was a place for contemporary family life, work, writing experiments, observations, fiction, old Diary transcriptions, reconstructed childhood memories, interaction with other diarists and, increasingly, reflection on what online writing itself might become.
By 2003 I was monitoring readership and page views obsessively: daily views could range from 150 to 800 from 40–200 visitors. Diaryland was therefore not simply a blog before the word became commonplace. It became a writing laboratory and personal repository.
In 2002 I was using it alongside The Artist's Way, participating in writing marathons, beginning novels, joining a writers' group and experimenting with the pressure of producing and posting 1,000 words an hour. The old diaries were another strand: Diaryland allowed me to bring earlier handwritten material online while also digging further back into reconstructed childhood memory.
By June 2006, I was explicitly describing myself as “Loyal from September 1999,” and in 2010 I looked back on having been there for a decade.
In February 2010 the Open University introduced me to a student blog as part of my MA ODE postgraduate studies. I immediately recognised similarities with Diaryland. Then the migration accelerates.
On 14 February 2010 I wrote:
“Perhaps, a decade in, I am about to drift away from Diaryland.”
The reason was technological as much as personal. Five years earlier I had watched Diaryland friends move elsewhere but found the alternatives clunky and inferior. By 2010, I wrote, "This is no longer the case,” and identified WordPress as a possible new home.
Within twelve days I was writing in several places: the Open University blog for innovations in e-learning, a WordPress swimming blog, and My Mind Bursts on WordPress.
I was also actively migrating Diaryland entries suitable for a wider readership to WordPress.
By April 2010, I had blogs with the OU, WordPress, Edublogs and elsewhere, while simultaneously recognising the problem of being "spread too thinly online."
So the chronology was:
September 1999 — Diaryland begins.
The first sustained online diary: personal life, work, parenthood, old diaries, memoir, fiction and engagement with a community of online diarists.
1999–2005 — Diaryland is the principal online home.
It develops into an unusually large personal writing environment rather than merely a succession of posts. I remain with it even when other diarists migrate elsewhere.
2006–2009 — still Diaryland, but increasingly part of a wider online life.
The archive shows continued posting well beyond 2006; there is even a 2009 entry arguing for Diaryland as the best place for an online journal.
2010 — decisive fragmentation and migration.
Postgraduate study brings an Open University blog; WordPress becomes attractive enough to displace Diaryland; specialist writing begins appearing across OU, WordPress, Edublogs and other sites.
Thereafter, WordPress and the OU Student Blog became the enduring platforms, which have been the case ever since.
