News
Welcome to LiveJournal news. If you crave more frequent and detailed news, check out the following journals:
 news
| Infrequent, basic, overall news. (this page) |
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lj_maintenance
| Server status and planned downtime announcements. |
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lj_dev
| LiveJournal technical development & planning. |
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changelog
| Every little change, as it happens. |
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lj_test
| The testing community, for testing the above changes. |
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featureannounce
| A weekly digest of changelog events and new features. |
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lj_biz
| LiveJournal business-related community. |
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October Status Post
Friday, Oct 29th, 2004 -- 5:19 pm
jproulx |
As October rolls to a close and you all prepare to go scare little children and eat pounds of candy, we'd like to present upon you the latest in LiveJournal news: October has been another quiet month for ![[info]](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/http/web.archive.org/web/20041031131416im_/http:/=2fstat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} featureannounce news. We've made a lot of improvements to the site's backend and we've added a bunch of hardware (detailed below), but we haven't made a lot of visible changes to the site. One thing we have changed is the fact that communities can now be renamed, using the Account Renaming Service. Another change is the fact that you can add comments to your user picture icons through the Edit User Pictures page, which will show up on your User Pictures page.Also, a new feature that went live last night is the "Quote" button on all "Post a Comment" pages. Simply highlight text you'd like to quote with your mouse (or other input device), press the "Quote" button on the comment page, and the text will appear in the comment text box with the proper HTML quotation tags. We're adding optional display support for our S2 styles to show your comment quotes in cool and interesting ways. In hardware news, we've setup and racked two out of four of our new 64 bit servers. We've run into a few production snags with MySQL, but we've been working with MySQL's support team to fix them and have made a lot of progress during the past week. In the meantime we're rearranging users between optimized clusters and switching from using MyISAM tables to InnoDB tables. Rearranging users is a slow process, but it's all we can do while we wait for the new servers to be put into production. We've also been working hard on our Perl load balancer, all of which is helping to speed up the site. During this past month we've been making preparations to stop using our content delivery network system (Akamai) and serve everything ourselves. This meant moving all phoneposts, user picture icons, and all sorts of static files onto our new storage servers using MogileFS. The same storage servers are being used to host FotoBilder pictures, and things have been running smoothly. Speaking of FotoBilder, November will be dedicated to bringing FotoBilder up to production quality and releasing our photo hosting service for paid users. This will include full technical support, the ability to purchase more space on our storage servers, and adding more web servers to speed everything up. We'd like to thank all the beta testers that have been helping us so far. We hope you all have a great November, and a Happy Halloween! |
September Status Post
Friday, Oct 1st, 2004 -- 3:31 pm
jproulx |
September has been bittersweet for LiveJournal. We've been working hard and making a lot of progress on various development projects, but some of our interns have gone back to college. Late last month daveman692 left the office to go to college in New York, and our esteemed developer monkey whitaker went back to Ohio for a few more semesters of school. Don't fret though — they're both still working for us in their spare time, and they'll both be back for internships at a later date. Since our last status post there have been two major feature updates that you might have already noticed. First, maintainers of communities are able to delete posts that are made in their communities and mark them as spam at the same time. This prepares a report for our abuse team and alerts us to possible misuse of our service. Second, and probably the most visible change: we've updated and streamlined the Update Journal and Edit Journal Entries pages to include a few new options and make it easier to use. Now when you use our web pages to update your journal, you'll be able to preview various parts of your entry as you write it, and also preview the entry as it would look in your journal. We've also added a few convenience links up at the top showing you the different ways available to update your journal. There's still a few quirks, but we're working to get rid of the leftover bugs. As always, keep an eye out for feature announcements in featureannounce.In hardware news, as I mentioned in my last status post we ordered a new set of fast database servers, but since then we've run into various production snags and the delivery of the servers has been stalled. Because of the delays, we've ordered a bunch of new servers from various vendors, so we'll have a bunch of new machines in production soon. There have been a few posts in lj_maintenance outlining the server problems: "Bad news, good news", "Server Update". Brad just gave me an update and it looks like two of the new databases will be installed tonight, two are showing up in the next couple days, and the final two are being built right now. The goal then is to move everybody off our old 32-bit databases to these six new 64-bit ones (we'll post a more technical summary in lj_backend soon).Our photo hosting beta test is still running strong, and we've gotten a lot of great feedback from everyone involved (if you have a paid account and want to help out, please join fotobilder_user). We've made a lot of progress on fixing bugs, writing documentation, cleaning up the interface, etc, and we're working on a couple of cool new features such as image sharing and style previews. We're also working on a new backend protocol for FotoBilder, which we hope will encourage developers to write new clients.Hope you all have a great October! |
August Status Post
Tuesday, Aug 31st, 2004 -- 5:47 pm
jproulx |
August has been pretty good for us, if a little quiet. Brad was on vacation in Germany for a few weeks, and we chugged along making tons of site enhancements and fixing bugs. In feature news we've added a new S2 style called "Variable Flow", which is available to all accounts. This style has been designed with customization in mind, according to its author mart. Normal users can change just about anything in the customization wizard, such as page margins, fonts, colors, background images, etc. Paid accounts that write custom layers can change even more options, override certain strategic functions to add things like heading images, or even override the stylesheet completely making use of the fact that the markup is meaningful and styleable. It's a good style to choose if you want to get comfortable using S2. Feel free to check out s2variableflow to learn more.For our paid accounts we've enhanced our "express lane", and today we can really see the results: page requests for paid users are loading a lot quicker, while non/free users are seeing a slight amount of lag (moreso with packet loss from Internap). Please note that we're continually optimizing the site because to us, even a slight lag is totally unacceptable. As for new hardware, we ordered a set of new database servers with 64 bit processors and a ton of RAM, which are still being assembled, configured, and tested. Once they're ready to be put in production we should see a lot of performance gains, but until then we're shifting resources around to help balance server load. Most important news of all, we've given all paid members beta testing access to our photo hosting site! There might be a little lag getting your account ready, but once you're set up you should be able to upload your pictures. We strongly encourage any paid member who is using our photo hosting service to join the fotobilder_user community and give us feedback & suggestions. We're not completely launching the photo hosting service just yet because we're still in a major testing phase: we're still making improvements, still adding enhancements, and fixing all the bugs that pop up. There's a hard disk space limit of 50MB (you'll be able to upgrade to more space when it goes "live") and we're only running the FotoBilder code on two servers (storage servers are separate, so we won't run out of room), so we can't make any guarantee as to the quality of service you might receive. Please test at your own risk. Have a splendid September! |
July Status Post
Monday, Aug 2nd, 2004 -- 11:18 am
jproulx |
July's been pretty hectic for us; we had some server troubles early on in the month which we've taken care of, and most of us at the office have been working hard on FotoBilder and other projects. In new feature news, we've added a new page called Recent Comments which shows some of the latest comments you've posted and received on LiveJournal. Free users are limited to only 10 recent comments, but paid accounts can pull up to 50. The page is useful if you've not received your comment notification e-mails lately, but it's still a beta version so it may change at any time. In paidmembers news we've added a new feature called the "Express Lane", which allows paid users' browser requests to "cut in line" of others. What this means is that when our web servers are loaded, paid accounts get pages served to them quicker than other accounts. There are more details in the paid members community.In picture hosting news we've widened our beta test to include permanent and paid early adopter accounts. Now we're getting a lot of great feedback which is helping us to polish FotoBilder and work out most of the bugs early on. We hope to have the service ready for all of our paid users before the end of August. This update is pretty scant, but we've actually been working a lot on on infrastructure and stability changes, which has taken priority over new features. Almost all of our current effort is being put into refining our photo hosting service, so we'll have a better post (more information) for next month. Have a fantastic August! |
June Status Post
Tuesday, Jun 29th, 2004 -- 4:25 pm
jproulx |
We'd like to welcome brett, our new sysadmin, to the LiveJournal team. Our dynamic duo of Lisa and Brett should be able to handle anything we throw their way. We spent a lot of time in June taking care of various issues; fixing bugs, getting FotoBilder ready for launch, fine-tuning our new load balancer, developing more site monitoring tools, etc etc. There aren't too many new features we can announce just yet, but we did add something cool: There's a new feature on the comment pages (for those of you using S1, or S2 with old style comments) called Quick Reply, which is a reply box that instantly appears underneath a comment you want to respond to. We're working on porting this feature over to S2, so that everyone can benefit from it. More new features & bug fix announcements can be found at featureannounce.During the past few weeks we outgrew our network topology. This caused brief periods of downtime and long periods of slowness, at least until we were able to reconfigure our network and increase server interconnection speeds. We'd like to apologize for those hiccups, and we'll be offering some reimbursements for paid users affected by that slowness. We'll have more details posted in paidmembers either today or tomorrow.We've started a beta test for our photo hosting service, and we've gotten some great feedback so far. We're still working on various bugs and interface design, but development has come along very swiftly. We'd like to thank all of those involved with the beta test. We're aiming to launch pics.livejournal.com publically in the next couple of months, hopefully before the end of summer. Have an awesome July! |
