An OhLife Alternative
still here, still one email a night
If you kept an OhLife journal, you remember the ritual: an email arrived in the evening and asked how your day went. You hit reply, wrote a little, and that was that. It made journaling feel less like homework and more like writing to a friend who always asked.
OhLife closed in 2014. A lot of its journalers landed at Little Memory, which had been quietly doing the same kind of thing since 2011 — and plenty of them are still writing here, a sentence at a time.
Your memories come back
Write one line tonight and that’s your journaling for the day. Seven days on it turns up again, and after that it keeps turning up.
- a week later
- a month
- three months
- six months
- a year
- every year after
little memory
now
Exactly 1 year ago
Peaches at the stand. Bought far too many.
Have it come to you at an hour you pick, or leave notifications off and find them waiting the next time you open the app.
The ritual, unchanged
The evening email still arrives. You still hit reply, write about your day, and send — about fifteen seconds. Replying by email was one of Little Memory’s very first features, so it isn’t a bolted-on extra; the whole app grew up around it. There’s a page just about journaling by email if you want the details.
Your days come back to you
The other thing OhLife people miss is meeting an old entry again. That’s the heart of Little Memory too: it brings back what you wrote a week ago, a month ago, and a year ago, and reaches further back as the years pile up. Your sentences quietly become a little time capsule, and old lines have a way of returning on exactly the right day.
About your old OhLife entries
The importer is retired. OhLife’s export page closed along with the site in 2014, so there’s nothing left to import from. If you saved an export back then it’s a plain text file and still readable, which is worth something.
The old migration guide is still up if you’d like to see how it worked.
Still here, and planning to stay
Losing a journal home once is enough, so it’s fair to ask about this one. Little Memory has been running since 2011 with the same developer — the kind you can just email — and holds over 1,000,000 memories from over 30,000 journalers. These days the journal lives in an iPhone app, where your memories, photos, search, and backups all are; the email has never stopped.
Weighing a few options? The comparisons are honest about who should pick what, and the little tour shows everything else.
