ramblings
Bye Bye OhLife. Hello My Evening Post.
What is one to do when their favorite web app goes away?
I loved OhLife. I really did. If you’re not familiar with OhLife, it was a web app that sent you a daily email asking how your day went. You’d reply with whatever you want, maybe throw in a photo or two, and just like that, you’ve got an entry in your private journal.
Once you had a few posts written, the real magic of the service started to shine. At the bottom of the reminder emails, they would include a random post from the archives. It was awesome to see a post from months or even years ago. It was motivation to write more.
OhLife was a free service. They later launched a premium product for $24/year, but that was all the money they’d allow me to give them. I bought it to show support. To put my vote in saying, “Yes, please keep doing what you do.”
The Breakup
I had four years of posts with OhLife. Four years. I wrote about my grandmother dying, getting married, having a tooth extracted, my son being born and everything between. I would of used it forever.
When I got the email that they were closing up shop, I was heartbroken. What was I going to do? I tried migrating to Evernote & DayOne, but it’s just not the same. I had to go to those apps to write. They didn’t come to me. And they didn’t have a random post as motivation. It was just another journal app and it was getting neglected.
The Fix
I set out to solve this problem the same way I do for everything, with code. I started to write an add-on to the back of my personal site that would mimic the behavior, a hack at best. I told a friend and fellow OhLife lover, about my hack one night and after a conversation over a few beers, we decided to tackle the problem together and make it better in the process. I’d head up development and he’d tackle design and marketing. After many more conversations, beers and late nights, My Evening Post was born.
We’ve created a writing platform that I think you’re going to like and we’re super excited to share it with you.
My Evening Post
It has all the things we loved about OhLife and some new additions that make it better. For example: If you got tired of removing your email signature from every post, we’ve a got a nifty little feature to ease that pain. We’ve also got a list of ideas to make this service something special moving forward. Life moves along pretty fast and we’ve got a dead simple way to capture it.
If you’ve got an OhLife hole in your soul or are just wanting an easy way to write and journal more, then by all means, come check us out!
I’d love to hear what you think!
Apr 29 2015