Word Count Journal

» see wordcountjournal.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The sum of every whole number from 1 to 365 is 66,795. That identity is the entire design of Word Count Journal. You wrote one word on your first day, two on your second, and if you kept it up for a non-leap year you ended with a manuscript longer than most novels, having never once sat down to a blank page bigger than yesterday's plus one.

The site opened in January 2007 and the oldest journal on it starts on the 1st. A journal had a start date and an end date printed next to it and a progress line underneath reading something like "11 down, 354 days to go", which is the sort of counter that works on people. There were groups as well, 758 of them by 2011, some of them private school classes. Members uploaded photos and left comments on each other's entries. The copyright line at the foot credited MakaluMedia for the build.

I was finishing university in 2007 and the English I wrote was coursework, so a discipline toy for English-language diarists was never going to find me. What reaches me now is the arithmetic, which is a good trick: the hard part of writing every day is the size of the ask on day one, and this thing made day one a single word.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what filled it instead ~

By the end, the front page of a site about writing discipline was advertising hemorrhoid home treatment. The list of recently updated journals in the final working capture reads: iPhone unlocking by judithmayblogs, Web marketing by judithmayblogs, Hemmorhoid home treatment by judithmayblogs, Joomla Development India by opensource1, How do I Increase the Value of My Work by briantracy99. Every one of them sits at "1 down, 365 days to go", because an SEO account opens a journal for the backlink and never writes the second word.

Archive Team's page about the site is two sentences of description and then a verdict: "Wonderful site full of spam. No wonder they're closing it down." That is harsh on the 9,395 people who were actually using it, but it is what the front page looked like by then, and a community site whose newest content is all keyword bait has already lost the argument about what it is for.

~ the last twelve days ~

The ending is visible in the capture sizes. From 25 October 2011 the site served a 1.7 KB page reading "Temporarily Down for Maintenance", and it stayed that way through 11 December. On 23 December it came back fully, a working 10 KB site taking new journals, and it was still working on 4 January 2012 at 21:10 UTC, with someone signing up that day. On 5 January at 10:38 the page had become this, and nothing else:

"Word Count Journal is no longer being supported. Please contact [email protected] if you are interested in the domain and/or the application."

That notice held for most of 2012. By 6 December the domain was serving a parking page titled "search the web", whose body text reads "Hello there! Please feel free to search the web with Google!" It was still saying that in January 2014.

~ a timestamp in a filename ~

The Archive Team page says the site was last seen on 10 June 2011 and did not respond after that, which the capture record flatly contradicts: it was serving a complete working site in December 2011. The screenshot saved on that wiki is called Word_Count_Journal_1306877419160.png, and that number is a JavaScript timestamp in milliseconds. It decodes to 31 May 2011. That is the day somebody looked at the site, saw the shutdown banner already up, grabbed the page and assumed the rest.

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