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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
LiveJournal News' LiveJournal:
- Rich Text Editor -- the beginnings of the rich text (WYSIWYG) editor is now available. If your browser supports it, the update.bml page now lets you switch to "rich text" mode. Should work in newer IEs and Mozillas. Mac support is limited to Mozilla, due to Safari/IE not implementing support for it. There are still a few bugs (JavaScript is the most painful programming environment), but we'll be working on it. It's sufficiently usable as is, though.
- Post from userinfo.bml -- From a community's userinfo page, you can click the pencil icon in the toolbar to post to that community, which saves some steps. Also, this finally adds support for that option in the community settings page where you can allow non-members to post.
- New mood theme browser -- the mood theme browser is now prettier and easier to use.
- Lots of memcache/database work -- nothing particularly interesting. But if you're a geek, you might enjoy this post in
![[info]](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/http/web.archive.org/web/20031218005215im_/http:/=2fstat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif)
lj_backend about our upcoming database config changes. - less clutter, less text, better navigation
- more modern web markup (important for accessibility)
- no sidebar making comment pages ugly
| Friday, December 12th, 2003 | |
| 5:00 am [bradfitz] |
Invite codes are gone Love 'em or hate 'em, invite codes are now gone. [post1, post2] We really just want to make everybody happy, and that's really hard. If we say we want to turn right, half the community asks, "why not left?". We can explain forever, but it's difficult following our long posts and replies in threads of 1000+ comments. So if you're not following everything, please trust us that when we choose one action or another, we're not intentionally leading the site into a fiery abyss of death, as many of the doomsday prophetizers keep suggesting. We have reasons for removing invite codes, and those reasons are not rooted in evil or ignorance. We want the site to keep being awesome. It started without invite codes and grew awesome, and it can continue to do so now without. Invite codes were just a temporary crutch back when our server backend couldn't handle things. And then we came to rely on that crutch, afraid to let go. Please, understand that we want this and we're ready for it. We have tons of extra hardware standing by. We have potential plans to deal with all the proposed upcoming problems, but we won't take any action until it's necessary. We don't want to change things just to change things. (We know that can be frustrating.) We're only going to be fixing actual problems, and invite codes were a problem. That said, don't be surprised if new little problems pop up, as they always do. Don't freak out the first time a page takes a little too long to load. We're watching these things all the time, ready to fix whatever. Our server backend is very impressive these days. I actually sleep at night lately. We'll be able to handle the influx of new accounts. Even if we run into some minor flames on the way there, we're not going into the fiery abyss.... I won't let us. ;-) Update, 1:50 pm PST: Wow... new accounts are being created 4 times faster than normal. Crazy. Oh, if you're in Seattle, Portland, Denver, or San Fran areas, here's the list of theaters where you can see the LiveJournal commercial starting today. (only one is playing in theaters, but we'll post them all online in MPEG and WMV formats soon....) |
| Thursday, December 11th, 2003 | |
| 10:31 am [bradfitz] |
Change of Plans: no invite codes, no trial accounts After our big announcement yesterday, we've been reading a bunch of great comments. (Thanks!) A lot of people don't like the idea of Trial Accounts, and we've been talking about them the past two days and don't really like them ourselves anymore. Once we went to implement them we found that the wording used to describe them throughout the site would've been impossible, and people would confuse permanent free accounts with permanent accounts, and so on. Plus, all the points about it not being in the spirit of the site, arguments about isolated users without online friends, proliferation of account types... all true. So, new plan! We're just going to ditch invite codes altogether. Free users will be able to join without an invite code, and without a 30 day expiration. For the users who value their invite code collection, we'll let you redeem them for paid time, either for yourself or friends. (the exact exchange rate hasn't yet been decided, but we'll try and be generous). For the users concerned with username namespace pollution, we'll start discussions in lj_biz on policy for deleting inactive accounts after so much time. It'd probably be based on multiple criteria with multiple time periods. Also, we might limit number of accounts per email address to something really high, to hinder username collectors. Please, let's not discuss this here... wait for the lj_biz thread to pop up.For the users wanting LiveJournal to remain exclusive, please realize that was never our goal. We want everybody to enjoy the site, which is in the spirit of everybody enjoying Open Source software. If you want your personal account to remain exclusive, there are settings you can use to accomplish that, and we'll be making even more functionality to let you control what happens inside your account. But in general, the more people using the site, the more fun it is for everybody else. Again, the goal for all this to happen is tomorrow. We're all busting our butts today working on it. Hopefully this version 2 plan will make even more people happy...... :-) Update: See these two posts in lj_biz about deleting inactive accounts and spammers/trolls and Karma/"Whoofie". Please reply in those threads about those issues, to focus discussion. |
| Wednesday, December 10th, 2003 | |
| 6:30 pm [bradfitz] |
Update Fun stuff in LiveJournal land lately. I'm rushed, as always, so I'll just zip through this: New code Just put a bunch of new code live that the LJ crew's been working on. Of note: New style(s) Jesse and Kevin have been working on new styles. The first, available to all users, is named "Digital Multiplex", and is a port of the OSWD (Open Soure Web Design) style of the same name. You can see it in action here: ![[info]](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/http/web.archive.org/web/20031218005215im_/http:/=2fstat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jproulx. It's S2-only, so select it from /customize/ after choosing S2 as your style system. A new one will be coming shortly. Contact jproulx about any bugs you find in the new style.Upcoming commercials A couple months ago we were approached by a production company that was looking to expand their portfolio into tech/web companies and wanted to make some LiveJournal commercials, since they were LiveJournal users themselves. My initial reaction was, "Naah.... too expensive probably, and we don't advertise." But they just wanted to make them for fun and were offering to make them at cost. So, we all talked about it and decided it'd be neat. They turned out really well. (we'll be posting MPG and WMV files soon) Anyway, we needed a place to show them and got a good deal with Regal Cinemas to play them from Dec 12th - Dec 25th, which is during the Lord of the Rings movies. So... if you're in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, or Denver, look for LiveJournal commercials during those dates. I'll post a complete list of theaters tomorrow probably. We did this more for the cool factor than getting new users (new users keep coming anyway!), but if the reaction is good, maybe we'll be running more. Invite codes We've always wanted to remove invite codes but it's a big, scary change, so we've been slow about it. Since we initially added them, though, we've added: screened comments, moderated communities, anti-spam-bot protection, community invites, and a few other anti-abuse measures. The final one we've been working on (if you follow lj_dev) is human tests: making users recognize a blurry word or distorted audio file before they can create a new account. This ensures accounts are made by humans and not spambots (which can't read blurry stuff or understand muddled audio). Anyway, we're rushing to finish that, and then the plan is to remove invite codes tomorrow or Friday morning. (the commercials gave us good motivation to finish by then)But... we know people are divided on this issue, some wanting LiveJournal all open, and some wanting to keep it exclusive. Also, some people value their invite code collection, and would be offended if we devalued it by making them obsolete. Update: See our new plan, posted the next day. Reliability The fact that we're working on new code that's pretty much cosmetic stuff, running commercials (scary), and removing invite codes (even scarier), should make it clear that we're getting pretty confident in our backend now. The site's been generally zippy for the past couple weeks now. We've been watching everything closely and identified and fixed a few problems, but we're finally after months starting to relax. Read lj_backend for all the fun details. |
| Wednesday, November 12th, 2003 | |
| 3:16 pm [lisa] |
It's beginning to look a lot like the holidays.... With ever more PhonePost A couple of months ago we completed the creation of a post by phone system. We had it working in the office but wanted to make sure our new bandwidth (Akamai) and disk space (NetApp filer) situation was working first. LiveJournal PhonePost allows users to call in, authenticate, and record an audio journal entry all by phone, then automatically post to your journal. You can choose on the phone to have the entries be public, friends-only, or private. Private might be useful to just leave yourself a note to get later. Your friends (or yourself) have the option of listening to your PhonePost and then transcribing it for other people who don't or can't listen to the post. This also makes it easier to find a PhonePost later, and is an alternative for deaf or hard of hearing people. We know we're not the first company to do it, but we're still excited about it. So-- we're giving it away free to all paid users! All paid users will be able to make 15 phone posts per month with a limit of 5 minutes per call. Here's a demo of Brad and I playing with it: http://www.livejournal.com/~exampleuser/ To set up your PIN for PhonePost access go here. We're launching this service with audio files in the .ogg file format. We've provided some information about .ogg files here. We may add mp3 support in the future, but due to licensing restrictions have decided to go forward supporting this open format. Our phone list currently includes phone numbers in a number of different regions. We don't have an 800 number yet, but will consider it going forward if we find enough demand for it. Any long distance or cell phone charges for using this service of course would have to be covered by you. Other questions may be answered by reading our FAQ: How do I record an audio post to my journal? and FAQ: How can I play Ogg Vorbis files? Disk Space All paid/permanent users now have 50 MB of disk space on our servers for PhonePosts, userpics and other upcoming features requiring file storage. Text journal entries do not count against this. To prevent us from having to store your PhonePosts and paid user files forever, we reserve the right to purge your files after your paid account has expired and gone back to a free account for 6 months. We'll be amending the TOS to reflect this. More userpics for paid users! We're happy with our Akamai+NetApp setup, so we upped the limits and now all paid users have 15 userpics instead of 10. Posting by email with PGP You can now post by email without sending a PIN in clear text across the net. If you use PGP or GPG you can just digitally sign your messages and we'll validate the signature on our end and post. Just upload your key and read the instructions. Pretty network diagram Ever curious how LiveJournal works internally? We discuss that in lj_backend. Here's a pretty picture.New hardware In our endless rush to stay ahead of growth, we just bought a bunch of new hardware. Oh, and we're done pushing out a ton more stuff from our "global cluster" (see picture above) to the user clusters, so the global cluster won't strain so much. But one of the new machines we bought is a new over-powered global cluster, so that'll be fun. Coming soon... Friends page via POP3 This isn't available yet, but soon paid members will be able to check their friends pages via POP3. That's right: you'll just have to add LiveJournal as an incoming mail server in your mail client, and let it check for friends updates in the background. All the details aren't worked out, but it's looking good so far. Additional PhonePosts and disk space Currently extra phone calls and extra disk space is not available for purchase, but it will be shortly. I think that's all for now. We'll try and read most the comments and make another news post answering major questions/concerns where everybody can see them. Please stay on-topic in the comments and we'll be able to get through it all easier... thanks! And enjoy! |
| Thursday, November 6th, 2003 | |
| 9:53 am [bradfitz] |
"Discount Accounts" So here's the latest in LJ scams... People are now saying they're "friends with the LJ crew" and have access to cheap accounts. They then offer to sell you $25 paid accounts for only $10, but they'll first need your username and password. These people then do get you a paid account, but with a stolen credit card paid for under your name. Once we see it's a stolen card, we suspend the victim of the hoax, thinking they stole the card. Things to be noted: -- we don't give cheap accounts to anybody for $10 -- never give anybody your password -- there are many scams out there. don't trust everybody. Please disseminate this to any community where you've seen this going on, translated into whatever language. (This scam seems to be popular within the Russian userbase lately....) In other news, we have a new community for technical folks, talking about the LJ architecture which kinda fills a gap we had before: lj_backend. There's one post there now, but there will be more over time. |
| Monday, November 3rd, 2003 | |
| 4:15 pm [bradfitz] |
extra userpic limit increase If you missed it earlier, we announced that we're letting people buy more userpics. Months ago we'd decided on 20 as a limit and it stuck, but nobody can remember why. I think it had something to do with the hardware we had at the time. But since we have a lot of new hardware since then (thanks to paid users!), we decided we can do better than that... After internal discussions and some math, we've raised the limit to 50, which seems cooler. Enjoy! (the change is retroactive, so if you already bought extra userpics, your limit is now 30 higher. same with permanent accounts.) |
| 1:53 am [bradfitz] |
More userpics It's been a long, hard struggle, but it's here at least.... You can now buy extra userpics. Just hit the store and select "Extra userpics", which brings your userpic limit to People with permanent accounts have had their limit raised to whitaker had this feature ready about 6-7 months ago, but we'd been waiting for massive bandwidth and storage. Now that we've got our Akamai service (for bandwidth) and NetApp appliance (for storage), we just had to flip a switch and turn this all on. (it took less time than writing this post...)I'm sure a lot of people will be happy about this announcement (it's our #1 feature request), but a lot of people will inevitably be angry as well. Let me address what I guess will be the three major complaints: Why can't free users buy more userpics? We don't want all those other paid features anyway! We didn't want to create competition between different sets of products. The price is so cheap anyway, that we figure people aren't paying because paying online is a pain, and not because of the cost. If any marketing/economic genius wants to prove us wrong, though, get in contact with us.... we can be swayed, given a solid enough argument. Why can't I buy more than But _____________ (insert LJ clone site) lets you have 9 million userpics! Yes, but do they scale? Do they understand the code they're running? Will they be around in a week or a month? Do they have advertisements all over their site? We may not offer 9 million userpics for free, but we have high moral standards, we're in it for the long run, and we know our code. For more info, see the FAQ item about all this. Anyway, that's all for now. Expect some fun announcements shortly. (we have some cool stuff ready and queued up that's just been waiting for the bandwidth/storage....) Update: See next post. We raised the limit from 20 to 50. |
| Friday, October 24th, 2003 | |
| 4:06 pm [bradfitz] |
Post by email We have a new feature available for users with paid accounts: posting by email. Check out the configuration and instructions for more info. We also made this feature available to early adopters, because I've been wanting to do this since the beginning, and the early adopters should have had it then. :-) In the coming weeks we plan to improve this feature with new authentication options and attachment support (so you can post pictures from camera phones). Oh, and props to our new code monkey mahlon for most the work on this new toy.Enjoy! Update: Many people are asking about the delayed comment notifications over the last few days. We used to have 2 email servers, even though we only needed 1. Then 1 blew up the other day, and the 1 surviving one wasn't enough to keep up with all the email and got behind.... so now we have 3 mail servers online, but that one burdened one is still catching up, sending out many-day-old mail. You'll continue to get old mail for a while, but it should catch up soon. We're going to be redoing our mail architecture, though, after seeing how easily our existing setup died. |
| Thursday, October 16th, 2003 | |
| 10:34 am [bradfitz] |
Virus -- NOT from us There's a new virus going around, claiming to be from LiveJournal admins. Do NOT open it. We will never send you emails with programs, zip files, screensavers, etc. The email reads: Hello there,You've been warned. In the future we'll be publishing SPF records so people can't forge our address, but currently not enough ISPs on the Internet support SPF, so everybody just has to use common sense. |
| Friday, October 3rd, 2003 | |
| 2:56 am [bradfitz] |
The new code is running! We've finished our work on the new code. Thanks for all the help testing... a few good bugs were fixed before it went into production. Most the site now runs from memory and doesn't get anywhere near a database with slow, moving parts (disks). There are still a few sections that use the database, but we're working on getting rid of those as well. If you encounter problems with the new code, please report them to the support area and we'll look into them. Affected code includes friends pages and reply counts. This isn't the end of our performance work, though. We have a nice list of more stuff to work on, and it's all fun/easy compared to this latest project. We'll keep you updated. |
| Thursday, October 2nd, 2003 | |
| 2:34 am [bradfitz] |
Help us test the new code! The new friends-view code discussed over the past few days is almost done. We'd like your help testing it more, rather than rushing it into production. More info on how/what to test is available here: http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_test/5909.html And that's also where you should report problems. It's important we get as much quality testing as possible. The sooner we verify it works for everybody, the sooner we can get it live and screaming along. Thanks! |
| Wednesday, October 1st, 2003 | |
| 4:39 pm [bradfitz] |
Maintenance -- Friends pages Due to a temporary surge in traffic caused by Speedera's caches filling up with everybody's userpics, we have to temporarily restrict access to friends pages. We're rushing to finish the new friends view code which uses memcached. It should only be for the afternoon (next few hours). As traffic drops tonight we'll turn friends pages back on. Paid users can still use their friends page, but we're closing off our payment area, lest anybody think this is a marketing ploy to get more sign-ups. We care more about the site being fast than your money. The rest of the site will still work for all users: comments, recent entry pages, etc. And hopefully it will work a lot better than currently, as friends pages are the biggest burden on the databases. We feel it's more important for the site to mostly work than to not work at all. Of course, our goal is for everything to work fast, and hopefully that'll happen tonight. This is something we don't plan to do again, and regrettably can't be avoided today. Thanks for your understanding. We're all working as fast as we can.... Update: Friends views are re-enabled, now that traffic has gone down. We're still working on the new code... should be up tonight. It's looking promising. |
| 2:30 pm [bradfitz] |
Status update The switch to Speedera last night went well, but now Speedera's world-wide caches are filling up (by requesting userpics from us, their origin) and is in turn killing db caches on our servers, hindering overall performance. This'll die down over time, but in the meantime we're racing to finish the project we mentioned here previously to remove the database query that's blocking the most (and blocking now even more because of the smaller effective caches). Once we get the NetApp, userpics and other media are all moving to it, so the fast disks and caches on our db servers won't be used to do simple stuff like images. I know you're all getting sick of the waves of suck and fast (and I am too), but we're really getting to a nice place architecture-wise... I think you'll all be happy in a bit here. |
| 4:36 am [bradfitz] |
More improvements Site update. Probably too technical, but it's 4:30am and I can't write two versions right now... In summary: more site improvements. Fun stuff. ( Speedera, DBs, NetApp, more userpics.... ) |
| Friday, September 26th, 2003 | |
| 12:13 pm [bradfitz] |
Site Update I hope you're all enjoying the speed of the site today and yesterday. We're continuing converting all popular and intensive database queries into using our memcached system instead. We're not done, though... we have one last query to convert, and then most of our 20 million+ page views per day won't even hit the databases. Because the databases are generally the limiting factor, involving slow moving parts, removing our dependence on them keeps making the site faster. We've also orded a bunch of new webservers, even though we don't need them. We just know from experience that web node CPU will be the next bottleneck... it always jumps back and forth between web servers and the backend. Now that the backend is perfectly scalable with memcache, all we have to do is keep buying web servers, which is easy. Also of note: We have some monster disk storage on its way and we're working on getting a lot more bandwidth. (or rather, getting better bandwidth rates by committing to higher minimums) We'll soon be offering options to upload large pictures for the userinfo page, posting by camera phone, and making mp3 posts from your phone. All these things were infeasible in the past, but with tons of disk and tons of bandwidth, it's play time.... Have a nice weekend! |
| Monday, September 15th, 2003 | |
| 1:24 pm [bradfitz] |
Want to work for LiveJournal? We're hiring again. Perl geeks in the Portland area, or those willing to relocate to Portland (it's an awesome city!), read this: http://www.danga.com/jobs/programmer200309.html Please pass this on to friends who you think might be interested. Thanks! Update: Wow, thanks for all the resumes! Unfortunately, we're going to have to close this up and start reviewing. We can't accept any more applications after 5:00 PM PDT. |
| Wednesday, September 10th, 2003 | |
| 11:33 am [bradfitz] |
Postcard update (with pics!) This is an update on our plea for postcards. We now have one complete wall covered in postcards [pic1] [pic2]. Also, much thanks for the fun items sent in like the Vince Carter basketball challenge [pic], magic 8 ball, candy, slinky, and Frank the Goat [pic]. The office is really starting to kick ass. Thank you everybody! |
| Thursday, September 4th, 2003 | |
| 6:05 pm [bradfitz] |
New site skin Over the past few months we've been developing, tweaking, and testing a new site skin called "Xcolibur". It's been the default skin on the test site for quite some time, but today we're finally making it the default, replacing the long-lived "Dystopia" skin. The goals for the new skin were: To change your default skin, go to the Browse Options page and click your preferred skin. Many thanks to colin, jproulx, and all the testers for their hard work on the new skin! |
| Thursday, August 21st, 2003 | |
| 3:28 pm [evan] |
more postcards We’re still getting lots of postcards. It’s really the highlight of my day to read through them all; one and a quarter million users is a number too huge to comprehend, but reading ten personal stories really makes me appreciate how LiveJournal has affected all of our lives. ...wow, that was cheesy. But heartfelt. We’ve received over 200 more postcards since bradfitz last posted here. We haven’t put many on the wall yet, because we haven’t really figured out a good system for it, but once we do we’ll be sure to take pictures.We’ll continue giving away accounts as we get more postcards, put we probably won’t announce any more after this. But for your reference (and their fifteen minutes of fame), we’ve recently given a free two months to ( these people. ) Thanks for the mail! |
| Wednesday, August 13th, 2003 | |
| 11:21 am [bradfitz] |
Postcard Update Thanks for the postcards! The previously mentioned postcard wallpaper plan is going well, and things are already looking more interesting in here. We got 2 postcards on Friday, 48 on Saturday, 52 on Monday, and 13 on Tuesday. (awww... slowing down?) Anyway, we've randomly picked some winners to get 2 month paid accounts. For the first 2 we received on Friday: clipdude and ragga_muffin.And we drew 3 from the Saturday batch: eleb, beastule, and oracne.We'll be picking more winners from the Monday/Tuesday batch later. We'll post some pics once we get everything hung up. |
