News

Happy New Years! It's 2004, and time for another State of the Goat Address!

Wrap-up from State of the Goat 2003
Last year we mentioned hiring some new employees (denisep and ryanfitz). They're still with us, and we've picked up some more throughout 2003: lisa got the sysadmin job we posted about and started shortly after the last State of the Goat post. nbarkas is also doing sysadmin stuff, and he started about mid-year. Those two are both in Seattle, with all the servers. In Portland we've picked up markf to work on the support and abuse departments and mahlon as a programmer. whitaker is still programming part-time while in school, but he'll probably go back in the summer to full-time again. xevinx was hired to do web design and styles and graphics and lots of pretty things (like this network chart), and daveman692 is doing an internship from a local high school. deveiant is in Colorado writing code, and I'm stuck in PA for the time being, but we both have plans to move to Portland soon. One of our minor goals for 2004 is to have most of the employees working in the same physical location, which'll be nice.

Another goal of ours for 2003 was performance, which we feel we've improved on quite a bit. We developed memcached, which we're now using like crazy (even other sites across the net are starting to use it, like Slashdot and Wikipedia). Even though we've come a long way, we haven't gotten it perfect yet. Things fly most the time now, but there are occasional glitches. Our goal for 2004 is reliability: we want to be consistently fast, even if a bunch of servers crash at once. In lj_backend we talked about our new master-master DB setup which we're starting to reconfigure everything to use. Over the next few months we're working on shuffling users around between DB clusters and upgrading old hardware and setting machines back up in the new config.

Moving on: we talked about S2 beta testing last year (our new style system). There are a few things that aren't complete, pages that aren't customizable (like the "your comment has been posted" page), but it's largely done. xevinx and I have been making new styles for all users, and we'll continue to do so throughout 2004. We also might sponsor an S2 design contest like we did for the old style system.

And finally, we talked about wanting to remove invite codes, which we just recently did. It feels so good now. All the work that led up to that was really nice, too: moderated communities, screened comments, community invites. It's all stuff that lets people have more control over their account.

Highlights of 2003
Lots of events and new features happened in 2003 which we didn't foresee at the beginning of last year:

• New payment system / The LiveJournal Store
• Easier community management and moderation
• Post by Email
• New site skin Xcolibur
• Ping Weblogs.com
• New load balancing and improved site performance
• User picture icons add-on packs and increased quota
• memcached
• Post by Phone
• NetApp (lots of storage space) and distributed bandwidth services
• Lots of "polish", fixing many bugs and improving features

Questions addressed
I recently asked people if they had anything they wanted address for this year's post. Since we've only given you a limited time to comment (and in that time have garnered a healthy number of replies), we'll be answering all of your concerns in another news post in the near future. However, here are some of the topics that caught our eye:

What is the status on some of the much talked about projects like journal statistics, photo-hosting, etc?

How far along is S2? What's left to do, and what will we see from it?

Do we plan to sell more permanent accounts? When?

Will we start to purge deleted accounts more frequently? Do we plan to delete inactive accounts? How will we handle namespace pollution?

lj_biz

What's the current climate around encouraging people to buy paid accounts? Are we going to see really compelling new features, or free-user limits in the next year? Or is 5% paid accounts an acceptable rate?

What were the real cost of the commercials, and what effect will that have on the service?

lj_biz

Plans for 2004
Things we're interested in working on this year:

• Secure logins and password changes using SSL and challenge/response (This is now live on the site)
• Reliability improvement, mentioned above and in lj_backend
• Photo hosting (we have the hosting portion already written, now it's a matter of integration)
• Posting by camera phone (waiting for the photo hosting)
• Subscribe to get email/other notifications on any type of event: comments in any thread/journal/action. (ESN system)
• Raw data access, fetching comments and downloading your entire journal
• More new S2 styles
• Increased interoperability between LiveJournal-based websites (opt-in roaming authentication, separate namespaces)
• RSS and Atom syndication improvements

As usual, we'll be posting about these goals here in news as the year progresses.

Have a Happy New Year!