The Update You Never Wanted in Site Updates

Oh my. This is hard. How do I even start?

Hopefully you are sitting down for this.

All right, here it goes…

Prosebox is closing down.

I’m sorry. I can’t do this any more.

If you’ve noticed more problems than usual on the site lately, I’m sure you’re not alone. We never seem to have fully recovered from the big outage a month or so ago. Something is definitely off, and I’ve just never been able to completely sort it out. It would require a good amount of time and effort to make the site fully stable again, as well as profitable. I’m not prepared to do that, and the site is already starting to languish.

I hate to break bad news and disappoint everyone, but it’s been weighing on me for a while. It’s just too much I’m afraid. Again, I am sorry.

I want everyone to have notice so that you can save your journals. Prosebox does have an “Export” feature, it’s just sort of hidden. You have to go into your profile, then select a specific book. On the Book page there’s an Export button at the top, second from the left. I’ve never load tested it so I’m not sure how well things will run if everyone tries to export all at once. I’ll cross my fingers I guess.

I’ll keep the site running until at least April 15th.

When I started this “hobby”, I never really expected it would be around for five years. I guess there’s that. Funny to look back at my online diary experience and ponder how this all started. I guess it was in 1999, when I was browsing a site called bored.com, and it pointed me to a site called opendiary.com. Naturally I was goofing off in my first real “career” job at the time, as well as going through a John Hughes phase. I created a user called simple mind (based on the band Simple Minds), wrote a silly entry cracking Ferris Bueller’s Day Off jokes, and someone showed up and commented on it. Guess I was hooked after that.

Then a long time later I dreamed up Prosebox. Decided to stick with the same user name, even if it sounded like the guy running the site was just a simple-minded simpleton. And here we are today, with me shocking you with bad news and letting everyone down.

I’ve met a lot of amazing people on this site. It’s been an amazing experience. I’ll miss this. Take care.

EDIT: Everyone must be exporting their data. Site is crawling right now.

Since replying is currently difficult, will just append to this to say:

No, it’s not an April Fool’s joke. I’m sort of a stickler about doing that on the correct day. Was thinking of hosting an Easter egg hunt without actually hiding any eggs.

Am I totally opposed to passing the torch on to someone else with the proper qualifications? No, I’m open to discussions. Didn’t want to solicit offers and get anyone’s hopes up. But if you’re comfortable with Django/Python, Postgres database, nginx, Ubuntu, and other assorted things and would like to get into the online diary maintenance business, I’m open to chatting about it.

Last updated March 28, 2018