From November 1997 to March 1999 I kept an online journal called Differential, after the blood test, a joke only the lab people got. A little over three hundred entries, four or five a week, about my family, my apartment, my sister, my nights. Then my cousin found it, and I took it down the following Sunday.

I still get letters, two or three a month, from people who read it or who want to start their own, asking how I did the parts that worked. This page is my answer. It isn't about what to write. It's the procedure manual: how the pages fit together, how the readers find out there's something new, and how to keep the whole thing from hurting anybody, including you. I write procedure manuals at work. It comes naturally.

On the journal I never once said where I lived or what I did for a living. Here I can, because this page isn't a journal and it isn't about anyone but me. I'm thirty-two. I'm a medical technologist in a hospital lab in Albany, New York, and I run blood counts and chemistries on the evening shift.

A word about words: most of us call them online journals, or online diaries. A few computer people call theirs a weblog, which is a fine word if you're a computer person.

ONE ENTRY, ONE ANCHOR

Put a named anchor just above every entry's date. Then anyone can link to that one day, and so can you, from next month's entry or from your archive list. Half the journals I read linked back and forth to each other's entries this way, which is how a little neighborhood of us grew up.

Name each anchor by its date, year first, all eight digits: 19990314. The names sort, they never repeat, and you'll never have to wonder what you called something. And use all four digits of the year. In three months 00 comes after 99, and you'll be glad you did.

THE FRONT PAGE AND THE ARCHIVES

Newest first, on the front page. Your readers come back to see what's new. Put the newest entry at the top and keep two or three weeks there, no more. Nobody wants to scroll past last Tuesday to find tonight.

One archive page per month. Name them year first, the same way: 199711.html, 199712.html, 199801.html. They'll line up in order in your folder, and January of 2000 won't land in front of November of 1997. Every archive page links to the front page, to the month before and to the month after, at the top and again at the bottom. Then keep one more page, archives.html, that lists every month. Readers who find you late will read you from the beginning, and some of mine did, all sixteen months, in a weekend.

I kept the archives oldest first, so a month reads like a chapter, start to finish. Some people keep newest first everywhere. Pick one and keep to it.

Do the archive before the front page. When a month ends:

1. Make the new month's archive page and paste in its entries.
2. Upload it.
3. Click every link on it, including the anchors.
4. Only then cut those entries off the front page and upload that.

Do it in that order and an entry is never nowhere. I learned this the night I cut the first half of February 1998 off my front page and then discovered my archive page had never saved. Three readers had copies on their hard drives and mailed them back to me. I will love them forever.

THE NOTIFY LIST

Readers who wanted to know when I'd written something new sent me their e-mail address, and when I updated, I sent one short note to everyone on the list. At the end there were 212 people on it.

Put every address in the Bcc line. Never To, never Cc. Bcc is blind carbon copy: everyone gets the note, and no one sees anyone else's address. Put your own address in the To line. Every mail program has a Bcc line; in some you have to turn it on. A journal I used to read once went out with the whole list in the To line, and a few hundred strangers had each other's addresses before breakfast. Some of them used them.

Keep the note to three lines: the date, a few words about the entry, and how to get off the list. Keep the list itself in a plain text file, keep a copy of it on a floppy, and take people off the same day they ask. There's a template for the note on the next page.

DATES

Every entry's heading should carry the weekday and the year: Sunday, March 14, 1999. Not "3/14." Not "Sunday." Someday somebody will land on one entry from a search engine, a year or two from now, and need to know when it was. Check the weekday against a calendar, too. I got one wrong in my first month, and four readers wrote to tell me so.

COUNTERS, STRANGERS AND BURNOUT

The counter. I had one, and I looked at it four times a day. Then I took it off, because I'd started writing for the number. This page has one, down at the bottom, because it's a how-to page and I don't mind. On a journal, if you must have one, put it at the very bottom and don't look.

Mail from strangers. Mostly kind, often lovely. A woman in Oregon whose sister was sick the same winter mine was. A man who wrote every single day for a month and then stopped. One reader who sent me three pages on what I should do about my sister. Answer what you want to, when you want to. You aren't on call. I kept a mail folder called Kind and read it on bad nights.

Burnout. Somewhere around month ten I noticed I was writing because people were waiting, not because I had something to say. The entries got shorter and gloomier and more about the journal than about my life. When that happens, take a week off, and say so in one line on the front page. Readers wait. The ones who don't wait weren't really reading.

PRIVACY

This is the part I'd tell you first if you only let me tell you one thing.

• No last names. Not yours, not anyone's.
• No workplace. Not the company, not the department, not the town if you can help it.
• Write as if everyone in it will read it someday. Because they will.
• Decide now what you'll do when they do. Before it happens, while you can think straight.

I followed the first two for sixteen months. First names only. No town, no hospital. In March my cousin Bonnie found the journal anyway, by searching for the name of the little lake where our grandparents had a camp, which I'd mentioned twice. There aren't many pages in the world that mention that lake. She read sixteen months in one night, including what I'd written about her wedding.

We've talked since. We're all right now, mostly. But I'd planned for strangers and never once planned for family, and when it happened I had no idea what to do, so I did the only thing I could think of and took everything down. You can't make a journal impossible to find. You can only make it something you could stand behind at the kitchen table, with the people in it sitting across from you.

The Glass House Journals WebRing, a ring of journals written by grown-ups about their own lives, has house rules I wish I'd read in 1997. One of them asks members to respect the privacy of the people in their journals: change names, leave out addresses and employers, and ask first, or leave it out. That's exactly right.

KNOWING WHEN TO STOP

If you stop, say goodbye. Leave a last entry up for a month or two, so your readers aren't left wondering. I didn't. I took the whole thing down in a panic on a Sunday night, and six months later I still get letters asking if I'm all right. I am. I'm fine. This page is partly for you, if you're one of them. Thank you for reading, all that time.

And if you're about to begin: go ahead. It was one of the best things I ever did. Just do the procedure right.

Templates: an entry, an archive page, a notify note