We'd like to thank you for sharing your favorite LiveJournal communities last week. Frank was so inspired that he's itching to see more of your stuff. Flash him a userpic of your favorite celebrity or fictional character (be sure to tell Frank who it is and why you love them), and he'll send you a Rubik's cube to while away the hours.
Important stuff to know
Cross-posting update: We've eliminated the ability to cross-post screened comments and comments on protected entries to Facebook and Twitter for all users (i.e., both Cyrillic and non-Cyrillic). As a result of this change, only public content can be cross-posted through this feature.
LJ Times: If you've opted into Cyrillic services, the display of the new LJ Times bar is now under your control. You can use the Display LJ Times setting here to switch this feature on or off at any time.
Spam update: We're still battling the recent influx of spam. Please remember to select the 'Mark this comment as spam' checkbox whenever you delete a suspicious comment. Maintainers can help by clicking the 'Delete and mark as spam' button.
Custom userheads update: Thanks for your suggestions regarding this new feature. We plan to expand and diversify the availability of custom userheads and add seasonal userheads as well.
m.livejournal.com: We appreciate you taking the time to provide feedback on our new mobile version. We have forwarded your comments and suggestions to our development team.
Blurb exclusive for LiveJournal users
Blurb is extending another exclusive 20% discount to LiveJournal users, good toward the purchase of any books on Blurb until October 31st, 2010 (11:59pm, PDT). For those of you who participated in Blurb's annual photography contest (which LiveJournal helped sponsor), you can view the anthology of winning photos here.
To redeem your discount, please use the following codes at checkout:
FALLBLOGBOOK (USD code), for a maximum discount of $40.00
FALLBLOGBOOK1 (EUR code), for a maximum discount of 32.00
FALLBLOGBOOK2 (GBP code), for a maximum discount of £22.00
FALLBLOGBOOK3 (CAD code), for a maximum discount of $42.00
FALLBLOGBOOK4 (AUD code), for a maximum discount of $51.00
Free pups for our paid users!
If you have a paid or permanent account, you can send five free puppies now through Monday, October 11th, at 4pm, PDT! You'll see both the free and the $0.99 K9s displayed until they've romped off to your friends. Please send only one at a time. In other words, you'll need to complete check-out and start a new order for each puppy you send. If you're not receiving vgifts (from friends and/or Frank), you may have disabled them. To enable vgifts, visit Edit profile (under Profile), scroll down to the bottom of the page, and check your settings. On behalf of Frank, we wish you and your puppies happy trails!
Did you know ...?
This week we're talking about Notes, an internal comment of up to 200 plain-text characters that you can write about another user or community that only you can see. You can create notes to keep track of nicknames, important dates, or other information that you want to remember. Keep in mind that the total text size of all of your notes cannot exceed 64 kilobytes. For additional information, please see this FAQ. Notes are only available to Paid users.
If you'd like to add or edit, here's what you do:
Hover over the userhead of any user or community and select 'Add Note'; You can also choose the 'Add Note' option from the menu of any user or community profile page (in the upper right column of links).
You can also add Notes when you friend, ban, or unban a user or a group of users (you'll have the option to set the same note for all).
You can also edit Notes by selecting 'Edit note' from the userhead hover menu for any user or community for whom you've added a Note.
If you've created a note for a user or community, you will see an asterisk (*) after the linked LJ username. You can view your private notes in any of the following places:
Below the username in the Hover Menu
After the username of a comment poster on a comment page
On the user's profile, immediately after their username
On the Add or Remove Friends page
On the Ban and Unban Users page
On the Manage Notes page
Want us to write about your favorite feature? Just let us know in comments below!
For photos and fun with Frank and Meme, we'll catch you under the cut. ( Collapse ) Thanks, again, for joining us. We'll see you next week!
In the woozy afterglow of userpics, we've had an intense week here at LiveJournal. We've taken a step back to examine operational issues that will help us improve performance. While we continue to look within, we're hoping you'll distract Frank from nibbling on the wires by posting a two-line rhyme about your favorite snack beside a yummy userpic. Here is Frank's example: There's nothing that tickles my britches //like barbecued jeans with white stitches. To celebrate your virtual birthday, Frank will bake you up a delectable double-fudge cupcake!
Important stuff to know:
Billing issue: We understand that orders are not being credited properly. We're currently investigating the issue and hope to have it fixed as soon as possible.
Server Time-out: As part of our continuing efforts to improve site performance, our mighty ops guys will be performing database server maintenance in the key of E on Friday, April 30th, starting at 9PM, PDT, which will last from 30 minutes to an hour. We strongly encourage you to make the most of this downtime by sharing a special moment with your pets.
New Header: We hope you love our new header as much as we do! Thanks, again, to snooby for contributing the winning design!
Unite to fight spam: We want to thank you for helping us win the ongoing battle against spam. We hope you'll continue to check the report spam box whenever you delete spam entries/comments in your journals and communities! In addition, we recommend that you screen non-friend comments that contain links in your journal or communities. To update your settings, click on the Privacy Tab in your Account Settings, scroll down to Comment Screening, and choose 'Comments from non-friends with links' from the drop-down menu. You may also want to use the Anti-spam field on the same page to show a CAPTCHA to all non-friends who comment. If you're a community maintainer, you can alter these settings by selecting your community name in the 'Work as user' drop-down on that page and clicking Switch.
Be a Beta tester: In order to make our features more intuitive, we're hoping to expand our amazing group of beta testers. We're looking for around 20 additional users to help us test upcoming features. Your feedback will provide invaluable insights that will benefit all LiveJournal users! You don't have to be an experienced user to participate. In fact, we're especially eager to welcome newer users who are not particularly technical. If you'd like to throw your name in the hat, please tell us a little about yourself in lj_releases at this post, i.e., how long you've been using LiveJournal, whether you consider yourself tech-savvy, tech-competent, or tech-phobic, and anything else you'd like us to know (e.g., whether you're a social media junkie or a casual user, etc.). We'll then invite 20 users to join our beta-testing group. We want to thank you, in advance, for helping us make LiveJournal even better!
Blurb discount for LiveJournal users!
In recognition of all the creative talent on LiveJournal, Blurb is extending LiveJournal users around the world a special 20 percent discount, which covers both self-publishing and book orders (worth up to $200 in savings). And, while you're in the neighborhood, be sure to stop by and visit our amazing anthology: LiveJournal: The First Decade. If you've already received a copy, we hope you'll post a comment and spread the good word!
For our featured photo and more fun with Frank & Meme, we'll catch you under the cut! ( Collapse )
Thanks, again, for joining us. We'll see you next week!
In anticipation of exciting things to come, we're delighted to announce that you can now start rebuilding your Userpic collection entirely from scratch! If you've been putting off the drudgery of deleting your old Userpics one at a time to reinvent yourself, help is on the way! Starting today, you'll notice all of your Userpics slowly disappearing, giving you the opportunity to create a brand new collection that meets your every changing mood and identity. In the meantime, Frank would like to honor the new month by celebrating important firsts. If you were the first among your family or friends to do something totally groundbreaking (e.g., throw out your TV, become dangerously obsessed with Arrested Development, renounce junk food, enter a hot-dog-eating contest, etc.), send Frank a mushy Muah!, and he'll honor your virtual birthday with a yummy snowflake cookie. To prevent a possible avalanche, he'll only toss his sugar cookies to the first 20 pages of commenters.
Serious stuff you should know:
All joking aside, congrats to our homegrown celebs at ohnotheydidnt, who broke a LiveJournal record with over 100,000 members! Cheer them on here!
Just a heads up: In order to improve site efficiency, we'll soon be purging LiveJournal accounts that have been suspended for more than six months. This will help us improve overall site performance. It will also free up a lot of parked usernames! We want to thank you, again, for your patience while we get our servers up to speed. Please note that if you have a suspended account, you can still download and save your journal entries.
It's time to cast your vote for Round One of the second LiveJournal header design contest! We received such a dizzying number of entries (75!) that we'll ask you to choose one finalist from each of the five polls below. We'll post Round Two in next week's News so you can choose an ultimate winner. Polls remain open until Wednesday, April 5th, at 2pm, PST. Brace yourself for some tough decisions:
We invite you to start posting header designs to remixed for our next monthly contest. In addition to achieving eternal fame and glory, the winner will get a $25 gift certificate. All other participants will receive $5 gift certificates (only one per user). Entries should be 900x90 pixels and should include the LiveJournal logo and menu, so we can see what your header will look like when it's up and running (which will be from mid-May to mid-June). Thanks, again, for sharing your talent!
We wanted to run an idea by you. We were so blown away by all of your amazing header designs that we'd like to develop a gallery of user-made journal styles. Sadly, the last time we tried something like this, we didn't get much of a response. But given the incredible amount of creativity we've seen lately, we wanted to know if you'd be interested in a monthly journal style contest. The winning entries would be placed in a featured gallery for all LiveJournal users to adopt and adore! We'd also award gift certificates to winners and participants. Tell us what you think below. BTW, you can check out existing styles here.
Photography Book Now 2010 contest
We're pleased to be a sponsor of Blurb's international photo contest, Photography Book Now 2010, featuring a panel of distinguished judges from the world of art, publishing, and journalism, including Radius Books, The New York Times Style Magazine, the SF MoMA, and the London Sunday Times. You can start submitting photos in the areas of Fine Art, Editorial, and Portfolio now through July 15th! Winning photos will appear in a book to be published and distributed by Blurb. The grand prize winner will receive $25,000 with plenty of additional awards for runners up. You can view the contest rules here. Happy shooting!
For our featured photo and more drama with Frank & Meme, we'll catch you under the cut! ( Collapse )
Thanks, again, for spending time with us. We'll see you next week!
We want to acknowledge all of the amazing work you've been doing to support relief efforts in Haiti. We've already raised over $4,100 from the sale of our Haiti vgift! Thank you for the wonderful suggestion!
We were so inspired by your compassion that we've decided to run a two-day charitable vgift drive. Beginning next week, from Thursday, January 28th, 4pm, through Saturday, January 30th, 3:59pm, PST, we'll donate 100 percent of the proceeds from all vgift sales to CARE and UNICEF (we'll cover the credit card processing fees). And, remember, for each $10 you receive in vgifts during a two-week period, you'll get two months of paid account time. For more info, read this FAQ. To meet other LiveJournal users who are committed to making a difference, check out help_haiti, which has already raised over $16,000! If you hear about other LiveJournal communities that are supporting Haiti, we encourage you to get the word out in the comments below. We hope you'll promote our charitable vgift and next week's fundraising drive in your journals and communities.
Stuff you should know
AOL notifications are back! You should resume getting timely notifications via AOL email addresses for journal entries and all other selected activities. Just FYI, we cannot resend notifications that were purged by AOL before they hit your LiveJournal inbox.
There are a few other outstanding issues involving missing notifications. We're aware that some LiveJournal messages are being intercepted by built-in spam filters coming from your ISPs and mail programs. If you're not receiving notifications, please check your filter settings, then contact your ISP or email provider to find out if they've blocked LiveJournal.
Just in case it got lost in the holiday shuffle, we wanted to remind you to try out My Stats (for paid users) and My Guests (for all users). My Stats provides instant reporting on who's been viewing your Journal, entries, and comments, and displays friending and RSS history. My Guests lets you see who's been checking out your journal (while allowing you to opt out and stay hidden should you prefer to fly under the radar). Both are listed under My Stats in the Journal menu. Love it? Hate it? Tell us what you think!
DON'T FORGET: We'll be taking down the site for a few hours this Friday evening, from around 7pm to 10pm, PST, to perform backend maintenance. Depending on where you live, this window will fall between Friday and Saturday, January 22nd to 23rd. For further details, please read this entry in lj_maintenance.
In anticipation of Valentines Day, we're collecting stories from LiveJournal users who found their Significant Other and/or Best Friend Forever on LiveJournal. Tell us how you met, and we'll send you and yours a Valentines vgift!
Special offer from Blurb
In honor of the unrivaled creative talent on LiveJournal, Blurb is extending an exclusive discount to help you turn your journal or community into a book. If you're interested, you can use the following codes at checkout:
It's been a momentous 12 months here at LiveJournal. We crossed a capital T at Ten years young. And, like most precocious pubescents, we celebrated turning double digits by publishing our first book! Needless to say, we've experienced some major changes, both inside and out. Before we recap, we'd like to thank you for bearing with us as we've struggled through ungainly growth spurts, identity pangs, and, yes, the occasional blemish. We hope you'll continue to stand by us: We're gaining wisdom with maturity.
Stuff you liked
Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work.
We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more sifting through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.
You got your fix
We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. Please note that this still needs more tweaking, and we are working on the one-minute cut-off issue. For more info on voice posting, read here.
At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.
Paid features you enjoyed
In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted. We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry in paidmembers or check out the FAQ.
Mixed reviews
The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.
Missing Inaction
We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.
Stumbling points
Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.
Full steam ahead!
As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history!
Just in time for holiday shopping, we're thrilled to announce the release of our ten-year anniversary anthology. Published by Blurb.com, the book showcases a decade of extraordinary talent drawn from LiveJournal users around the world. This must-read compilation features stories, memes, photos, comics, editorials, graphic content, and more, including:
Excerpts from Oh No They Didn't (a/k/a ohnotheydidnt), the largest community on LiveJournal, covering celebrity gossip, entertainment news, and pop culture
A look at post-Katrina New Orleans from the journal of Poppy Z. Brite
Gripping narratives, including a poignant reverie on a blind date
Photography that spans the globe, ranging from old-fashioned Polaroids to underwater photography
What began as a late-night inspiration back in Brad Fitzpatrick's college dorm in 1999 has grown to encompass nearly 25 million users worldwide, with journals and communities covering every conceivable hobby, passion, and topic. To get your copy, please visit the Blurb Bookstore. For updates and entries from book contributors, please join lj_turns10.
Tweaks and enhancements
You can now ban a user from all of your communities and journals at once. To access this feature, hover over the person's userpic and choose Ban user everywhere from the drop-down menu.
In honor of National AIDS Awareness month, we've added a new charitable vgift. For each red ribbon you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to support the development and global distribution of an affordable HIV vaccine (we'll cover credit card fees). You can read more about IAVI at lj_cares. While we're on the subject, we raised $740 from our November fundraiser for Love Without Boundaries, which supports emergency healthcare and adoption of Chinese orphans. We thank you for helping us help others.
Photos of the week
We're back with more incredible pictures from our super-talented LiveJournal photographers. Congratulations to ilya_gorokhov, who is the winner of our very first lj_photophile poll.
We hope you'll continue to post, vote, and comment! A gentle request: Please post only one photo at a time and limit size to 350x350 (so images display properly on friends pages). And now, without further ado, get ready to cast your ballot and view more awesome user content after the jump!
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Curtains
Thanks, again, for joining us. Stay safe and snug out there!
Cue the cake and candles, it's our birthday! On April 15, 1999, brad registered the LiveJournal.com domain name, giving birth to the web's original community blogging platform. Ten crazy years later (and not without some growing pains), LiveJournal is still going strong and we're ready to celebrate. It's not every year that you turn 10, so we have lots of things lined up over the next few months.
Birthday Theme Design Contest
Everyone likes to get dressed up for their birthday and we thought it would be fun to come up with some new birthday suits for the site. Or rather, that it might be fun for you (if you're into S2 and CSS) to come up with some new outfits i.e. journal themes. If you love making new themes for styles like Bloggish and Flexible Squares, the LiveJournal Birthday Theme Contest is for you. Submissions open on April 29 and we want to give you time to fire up your imagination. The theme of this theme contest is "LiveJournal Turns 10," but other than that we're leaving it as open as possible so as not to stifle your creativity. You can use Frank, the LiveJournal logo, base your theme on an existing or past LiveJournal site scheme, or any number of things relating to LJ's tenth birthday. Winning entries will be featured in the Journal Themes on the customize page. We'll announce all the rules and technical requirements here and in lj_design on April 29 when the contest officially starts. We can't wait to see what you come up with.
Commemorative Writer's Block and LJ Spotlight
Part of getting older is looking back on your life and reflecting on those special moments. For the next several weeks we'll be running Writer's Block questions about milestones in your own LiveJournal life. We're mixing these in with the regular questions, so keep an eye on your Home page for your chance to wax nostalgic about topics like your first post ever and more.
We don't want LJ Spotlight to feel left out of the celebrating, which is why starting on April 20, the Spotlight will be shining its bright light back on some old favorites. Each week we're going to feature a popular pick from the past (kind of like the Greatest Hits of Spotlight) alongside two newcomers. That way we can all make new friends but keep the old.
Sneak Peek at the Birthday Book
One birthday plan we've had in the works for a while now is an anthology of LiveJournal entries from the past 10 years. (Maybe we've mentioned this before?) We're very busy finalizing the content of the book (let's just say we have new respect for all the work that goes into creating a book) but we wanted to give you a little advance preview of what's in it. Starting today, we'll be posting a weekly excerpt from the book over at lj_turns10. First up, it's Frank!
Coming Soon to a Journal Near You: Attack of the Blog Slurper!
We're using Blurb to make our book, and we're having so much fun that we want you to get in on the bookish good times, too. That's why we're super-excited (!!) to announce our new partnership with the friendly folks at Blurb. Blurb makes it easy to create your own bookstore-quality books, using their free BookSmart software and your content. Even better, Blurb makes it easy to turn your journal into a book with their Blog Slurper. In just a few short clicks, the Blog Slurper pulls (or slurps, if you will) your journal entries into the BookSmart software, where you can format it to your heart's desire. In less than a week your book will be printed, bound, and on its way to you. So if you've always wanted to hold your LJ in your hands, this is your chance.
Photographers should definitely check out the Blurb Photography Book Now contest. With a distinguished panel of jurors and a Grand Prize of $25,000, the contest is a great opportunity to showcase your work to an international audience.
To get you started, Blurb is offering LiveJournal users a little birthday discount. From now through June 30, 2009, you can get $10 off the price of a $29.95 book. Just enter promo code livej10anv when you order your book. Click here to let the books begin.
Tell Your Story
That's enough about us for one news post. Let's talk about you. We're sure you have a story of greatness to share, and our friends at Nature Made want to hear it. ( Collapse )
