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Registry 3.0

The Diarist.Net Registry (a.k.a. The Diary Registry) was re-launched in May 2002. The registry linking diaries, journals, and personal weblogs since Diarist.Net's inception in June 1998, has seen a number of upgrades in its nearly four years of service.

Originally, it was a hand-coded, manually-maintained collection of pages. Of course, as the number of sites listed surpassed 1,000, this quickly became an untenable arrangement. In November 1999, Austin journaler Greg Bueno built a basic CGI script (v2.0) to allow sites to be kept in a database format and finally! searched. It was upgraded several times through June 2001. Meanwhile, by popular demand, static "browsing pages" were maintained.

The database grew to over 5,000 by 2002, but even with a dozen volunteers, we were unable to keep up with verifying every link on a regular basis, meaning as many as 30 percent of the links had gone dead. Also, while improving the registry's representation in search engines, the manually-generated static browsing pages were difficult to maintain, and were frequently months out of date.

In recognition of these limitations, the registry was rebuilt from the ground up (v3.0) in April 2002. The database was adapted to work with Links 2.0 from Gossamer Threads (which was in turn adapted to work with the registry). On a basic level, we hope the new system will improve the process of adding, updating, and verifying links in the database. (It also builds static pages for us.) Additionally, the system will allow visitors to find new links, popular links, and even top-ranked links lists that will be updated automatically.

For the short term, we hope to again enable searching by author birthdate and sex. In the long term, we hope to expand on the built-in ranking system to allow for reader comments and reviews for each link. Stay tuned!

We hope you like the new-and-improved registry. If you have any questions (not answered in the FAQ) or comments, please don't hesitate to .


Updated: 24 July 2003 © 1998-2003 Diarist.Net · Powered by Gossamer Threads Contact: