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News
Welcome to LiveJournal news. If you crave more frequent and detailed news, check out the following journals:
 comm_news
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Weekly meta-summary of everything!
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news
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Infrequent, basic, overall news. (this page)
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lj_maintenance
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Server status and planned downtime annoucements.
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changelog
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Every little change, as it happens.
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lj_dev
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LiveJournal technical development & planning
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lj_biz
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LiveJournal business/marketing development & planning
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Good news!
Sunday, Nov 4th, 2001 -- 2:43 pm
bradfitz |
We've hired our first full-time employee, avva! (nobody else is full time, not even myself....)
Anatoly will be helping with programming. He's already done a lot work on LiveJournal in the past but his real job got in the way. Now he's done with that job and will be hackin' for us.
The main thing Anatoly will be doing first is internationalizing the site. Speaking 3 languages, I don't think there's a better person for the job. Currently we don't understand or support any types of text encodings ... we treat everything as bytes, which is terrible. Anatoly will be reworking everything to translate to/from Unicode as necessary when posting/viewing. This'll let you view friend pages correctly when people are posting in multiple encodings but more important, it'll let us do things like export XML correctly. (Right now it's impossible to generate proper XML without knowing the source data's encoding.)
In addition to that big project, Anatoly will be taking a share of both my fun to-do items and boring to-do items so more gets done and I'm not so stressed.
More news later....
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User Groups Poll Results
Wednesday, Oct 31st, 2001 -- 4:37 am
insomnia |
The results are available here...Thanks for the feedback.
If you are interested in being a part of the upcoming user group, which is forming chapters both nationally and internationally, you should join the forum for the user group here and take part in the polls they have, which will determine the group's name and focus.
The goal of these user groups will be to have fun and meet new people with similar interests in online journalling and weblogging. I suspect there will be a lot of other activities growing around the user groups, such as picnics, movie nights, and other social events, but they'll also be a great place to share ideas and learn things too. There is a lot of chatter starting up by people wanting to create new groups all over the place, so if you are looking for a user group in your area, this is the place to find it. Don't be afraid to post, asking for others in your area... that's how gatherings get started, after all.
The user group forum is also a great place to announce parties and gatherings. If any of you want to throw a local LiveJournal gathering sometime, think about announcing it on the forum too, and opening it up to all those other webloggers, diarists, and journalers in your area. There are a lot of cool people out there, living their lives on the Internet just like us.
LiveJournal is an open source project. We should not only be a strong community here, but we should be an active part of the larger community too. After all, we've earned a bit of respect and a seat at the table... Let's take it!
Go LJ!
m.
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User Groups Poll
Monday, Oct 29th, 2001 -- 8:21 am
insomnia |
As I mentioned previously, there is a user group that has formed for online journalers, webloggers, diarists, etc. Right now, this user group only has one chapter in the Bay Area, but additional chapters are opening in Boston and Paris. (If anyone wants to create a local chapter in their area, read this...)
If the first meeting was any indication, these things would be a lot of fun for people. The heart of the first meeting was going out to a coffee place, followed by a restaurant/bar and getting a chance to meet a lot of people with similar interests in online journals and weblogs.
My main concern is making sure that these meetings aren't just about traditional weblogs, but also about journals, diaries, and online publishing in general. That is why I have created a poll - to find out what you think about the idea of being a part of this group, having regular meetings around the country, etc.
( Bring on the poll! )
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State of the Goat
Monday, Oct 22nd, 2001 -- 9:19 pm
bradfitz |
This was going to be a long State of the Goat address but I'll try to keep it short and easy to skim. Things that need clarification will be clarified in the next few days if necessary.
Server Situation
I'm incredibly happy about our server situation now.
Our master database server (Cartman) was down to 200 MB of disk space free, and we were getting nervous (since we consume 100 MB/day). Luckily, all of our new hardware came in on time (a few days early, actually!) and (thanks to the help of a ton of people) we got it all installed and functioning just in time before we ran out of disk space. We now have a huge server and disk array powering the site.
We also have two new fast web servers that haven't been fully set up. Those will go online in the next few days.
I put a half-completed hardware.xml file in CVS that details all the hardware that runs the site. I've asked Dormando to finish it, then we'll update the site hardware page to use that as a data source. A lot of people keep asking what we're running on and it's getting harder and harder to keep all 20+ machines straight ourselves. Which brings me to point #2...
Documentation!
My new mission lately is documentation. Everything should be documented: site history, what the site is, how to use the site, code internals, db schema, the protocol, and site-local documentation like hardware.
Once the master manual (containing all documentation) is reasonably complete and showing progress from outside contributors, then I'll move on to the...
Fun Features!
I remember being on vacation a while ago and getting some email sent out by Dormando and Mark, promising all these fun features in the next few weeks. I laughed and went back to the pool or wherever I was. New features are nice, but I care more about system reliability, cleanliness, and documentation. My personal goal is to have tons of people using the LiveJournal code, not just us. There are already a handful of companies using LiveJournal internally and five or six public websites using it, but I want it to be a hundred times easier to customize, use and install.
However, I'm a sucker for features too. My current wishlist includes the following:
- Directory -- yes, it's coming back. (My roommate wants to look up single girls in the Seattle area.) It's not even hard to bring back, but there have been more important things to do. Those other things may not seem important, but there's always a lot more going on than is visible.
- Stats -- again, easy, and I want it myself. These will be just for paid users, since we owe the paid users.
- Live Front Page -- the main page of LiveJournal should be the portal but with tons of cool live default boxes.
- ... -- tons of other stuff.
The problem is that this is a wishlist. We've been promising these features for a long time, and though I think I can eventually complete them all, there's too much for me to do. So...
We want the Reverend!
I want to throw an LJ fundraiser to secure money not for new servers, but instead for 6 months to a year's salary
for a long-time net-friend of mine and kick-ass programmer to quit
his real job and work on LiveJournal full-time. I'm not going
to link Daniel's journal here (I think he'd get embarassed) but
I'm sure you'll get to know him in time.
He wants to work for LiveJournal (always has) but we've never had
enough money to pay him close to what he already gets. Now we
could afford to pay him but it'd be a little tighter than I'd like. Instead, I think we're going
to pay him about half of what he currently makes and he'll make up the
rest doing freelance work. Now, I could tell him, "Don't worry, Daniel, we
get enough money each month to pay you," because we do, but I'd feel a
lot better if we got that money up-front and set it aside to make him
feel more comfortable. If he's going to quit his job for us, I don't
want him scared that an unexpected revenue dip in the future will
jeopardize his paycheck.
Daniel has helped out on LiveJournal tons in the past and knows the codebase very well. He's wonderfully skilled in everything needed to hack LiveJournal, and then some. He's walked me through tons of stuff since I've known him. He'd be well worth our money.
But what do you all think? Is this a good plan? Should we sell a bunch of permanent accounts again to get a full-time hacker on board? (I'm not even full-time because of school.) Now that we're slowing down on our need for servers, would employees be a good new investment? Give me your feedback on this. We could really benefit from some more help.
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Weblogger User Group
Tuesday, Oct 16th, 2001 -- 5:34 am
insomnia |
I wanted to pass this bit of news on to anyone who might be interested...
Recently, a weblog user group was formed in the San Francisco Bay Area. This usergroup doesn't advocate a single online journal service, but aims to bring together people throughout the community to interact, share ideas, and maybe even work together at times. Judging from the interest it has received from people elsewhere in the world who want to start similar user groups, it might become the first of many such gatherings worldwide.
The Bay Area gathering is significant, however, since it is bringing together some of the key people in the weblog community. I expect just about every employee of Userland Software and Blogger to be there, as well as people behind other well known sites such as Metafilter and Lockergnome. We might even have the press there, in the form of Dan Gilmor, the technology reporter for the San Jose Mercury News.
Many of these people routinely speak at large conferences on the Internet, but in this case, they will be meeting on the third Tuesday of every month (that's today), 7 p.m at the Dana Street Roasting Company, 744 W. Dana Street in Mountain View, California. The cafe has free 802.11 wireless Internet access for anyone who wants to get connected.
While I expect the first meeting will be a bit disorganized and crowded, this user group would be a great place for anyone interested in online journaling to not only learn a bit more about what is going on out there, but also to help influence it. Judging from the reaction I have been getting from other people on the usergroup's maillist, they are very interested in LiveJournal and the powerful yet easy-to-use features we have that so many of us take for granted. We can frankly use more LiveJournal users at the meeting so that we are properly represented in the community.
Hope that if you are in the Bay Area you'll take the time to check it out... and if you see someone in a LiveJournal shirt, be sure to say hi!
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