OhLife Shutdown: Importer, Alternatives, and Reactions

On September 21st, my support inbox was abuzz with requests from folks asking for a way to import OhLife entries into little memory. At the time, I was yet unaware that OhLife had just announced they were shutting down.

I was just about to board an overseas 5 hour flight (with no Internet!), and I’d been scrambling to get fixes ready for the iOS 8 update for the iPhone app. Welp, t’was time to roll up my sleeves and get some code written and help out these OhLife orphans eager for lilmem adoption.

Enter the little memory OhLife Importer

You’re now able to take your OhLife export and import it into little memory: http://lilmem.com/import.

For some help on guiding you through your transition from OhLife to little memory, please check out my Moving from OhLife to little memory guide.

More Tools, Alternatives, and Replacements

A few other brainy folks have been quick to build tools to help users transition out of OhLife:

• Paul Arterburn put together a page to export your entries into JSON and a zipfile of your photos (no longer online). He also made Dabble Me, a replacement for OhLife.
• For those who’d like to switch over to Day One, Adil Ansari’s whipped up a Python script to help you out.
• BooneJS has a Perl script for switching to Day One as well.
• Abdylas Tynyshov’s whipped up an IFTTT recipe and also has a list of some alternatives. There’s also an IFTTT recipe by abdyas.
• Word on the street is that mailDiary’s got a way to import OhLife entries too.
• Ben Orenstein and Chris Hunt have built a paid subscription based replacement called Trailmix that also imports your entries.
• AhhLife is another alternative with an OhLife importer, and corresponding Hacker News discussion.
• Johannes Mirus’s got an alternative using WordPress. (German)
• Marc MacLeod has also created a paid and open-sourced OhLife alternative: DayJot.
• Einar Egilsson’s also written a self-hosted solution called MyLife.

Talk Around Town

To get more information and updates on the latest and greatest:

• Twitter’s got folks saddened by the shutdown.
• Hacker News had an extensive conversation.
• Reddit users have a brief discussion.
• MetaFilter’s got a little bit of chatter too.
• Kara Cutruzzula’s written an amazing and beautiful piece about how OhLife’s touched her and changed her. Wow.
• Rony Gao shares his thoughts on the reason for the shutdown.
• AppInn outlines various alternatives (Chinese).
• AlternativeTo also has a daunting list of alternatives.
• yoga destiny suggests switching to little memory on zhihu.com (Chinese); thanks!
• asher63 printed all four years of her OhLife entries and bound them into binders. Wow!
• Thierry Roget’s got a list of alternatives with screenshots. (French)
• A discussion on Paperclipping’s Forums by folks saddened by the shutdown.
• bambi1964 shares her thoughts (Japanese).
• greatghoul decided to move over to little memory; thanks! (Chinese).
• halfpie also recommends switching from OhLife to little memory; blushes (Chinese).

Hope this helps all ye OhLife orphans. little memory’s here for you if you’re looking to be adopted.