Diaryland

Diaryland is a blogging service that's been around since September 1999. It has a small no ads on diaries promise in the FAQ stating:

Is my diary going to have ugly banner ads or pop-up windows all over?

Nope, never! All that we ask is that you include a link back to www.diaryland.com on your page and that's cool with us!

The only advertising found on the site are small, discrete banners at the very top of member application pages, consisting of reminders to go gold and member-made banners for diaries provided by purchasing a membership, although people can contact about advertising on the site.

Members get their own subdomain at  and an email forwarding address. There is a templating system for the journals. It is possible to purchase "Gold" and "SuperGold" memberships that give extra features, as well:

So what do I get when I sign up for Gold membership?

Some of the features are:  You can host images on our servers to show up on your diary You get a stats tracker which shows you who is linking to your diary, how many people are visiting, etc. You can run banners in the members area advertising your diary to other diarists You can have optional fields added to your diary so you can track things like your mood, what music you're listening to, etc. You can create diaryrings, which are ways of meeting other people with similar interests to you. 

In addition, if you get the SuperGold membership for a couple of dollars more:  You can set up a comments area on your page so that people can leave comments about each of your entries You get a lot more space to store your images</li> You get a webmail account to go with your Diaryland email address</li> </ul>

Inactive accounts are occasionally purged. Diaryland doesn't have a friends page, but it has a buddy list that will highlight buddies who have updated since you last checked the buddy list page. Members can search for free.

Overall, Diaryland is pretty simple and might appeal to people who preferred the old LJ without the fancy whiz-bang. Except there's no user icons.