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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Poll Results & Style Contest
Monday, Mar 28th, 2005 -- 2:21 pm
jproulx |
We've tallied the results of the Development Poll, and it seems pretty clear what you guys want: More pretty! We did some basic comparisons based on account types and figured out some stats:
As such, we'll be working with the Six Apart designers to make us new styles as their time frees up. In the meantime we're holding an open S2 style design contest, so if you've made a cool style you'd like to share with LiveJournal, submit it! We'll also be focusing on adding tag support and sketch/whiteboard functionality to LiveJournal, since those are projects are more suited to us developers. Keep in mind that these suggestions are all side projects of our current development regime -- we're still working hard to make sure the site is secure and stable, and we're still working on and planning larger projects like ScrapBook, ESN, friends vs trusted lists, etc etc. |
Help guide this crazy ship
Monday, Mar 21st, 2005 -- 2:39 pm
bradfitz |
We've spent tons of time working on infrastructure to keep the site alive. It's time to work on fun stuff again. Stuff that's user-visible. Stuff that you makes use of all this infrastructure we've built. We're all working on most this stuff in parallel, because we all have different skills, but we're curious --- what are you most excited about? Based on your feedback we can rearrange groups to make sure we bust out what you care about soonest. And don't worry --- we're still working on ScrapBook. We're putting it on modern hardware and reworking the UI, as well as sponsoring client development. But a lot of us are done with our parts in that now, so this poll is about where those employees focus most of their efforts. Thanks! |
LiveJournal news update
Tuesday, Mar 8th, 2005 -- 4:33 pm
bradfitz |
I'm filling in for Jesse this month because he's still lethargic from his recent move to San Francisco. Move Status We're now rollin' four deep here in the 6A office, with more on the way. Whitaker's coming next week and we're even getting a manager who we helped pick out. A manager should do wonders for us, since we're a bunch of hackers without much (or too much, rather) direction, and it's hard for us to focus sometimes. Server Status If you're a free user on the Filetmignon cluster (Where am I?) I'm sure you've seen the on-and-off read-only messages the past couple weeks. While we enjoy the conspiracy theories that 6A is doing this to extract more money from free users, the truth is much less exciting. What actually happened is that we overloaded Filetmignon and while we had another database cluster ready to load onto, we didn't, because we were in the process of developing a powerloss test suite for our drive arrays. After the big dual power failure at our datacenter recently we found a bunch of our disks, controllers, and other storage products just plain lie to do better on benchmarks. While the RAID controllers have options to disable disk caching, they very often just don't work, requiring setting up each disk individually, then putting it back into the RAID. So now we have 2 db clusters (4 machines) ready for service, and proven to withstand powerloss, and we're moving traffic from filetmignon to the new machines. Filetmignon service will improve for free users over the next couple days. Photo hosting status We've finally finished the shopping cart and documentation for disk quota upgrades, so we've put that live now. If you're a paid user at 100 MB of storage and want more, options now exist. The next thing we'll be doing is devoting more servers to the photo hosting. While the storage system is massive, only three dinky machines run the application itself. We'll be expanding that shortly here. The three dinky machines were meant just for testing, but now it's production time. We also need to work on more clients to upload photos. Jesse's working on a cool photo publishing wizard that integrates with XP. The iPhoto plugins that already exist are pretty cool. Linux people have command-line clients, but no gThumb integration or anything yet. Mark has a stand-alone Windows client that works, but needs some UI work. If you're a contractor interested in doing some Windows development, you should email me. SixApart Integration Status So far LiveJournal is still run totally separately from everything else here, especially as we're still settling in, but the different teams are starting to talk about sharing skills. We recently presented to them our style systems so their designer people can make some nice LiveJournal layouts, so we're pretty excited about that. -- Have a magnificent March with artful alliteration! (as Jesse would say... :P) |
February Status Update
Friday, Mar 4th, 2005 -- 1:03 pm
jproulx |
Sorry folks, but we forgot that February was a short month and I was on the road down to San Francisco (I'm here now!) so we didn't get an update out for February. Expect a status update as I get settled here. Have a magnificent March! |
January Status Post
Monday, Jan 31st, 2005 -- 4:48 pm
jproulx |
January is now over, and what a roller coaster ride it was! Early on in the month we made the huge announcement that Six Apart bought LiveJournal. The week after the announcement LiveJournal suffered a major power loss at its colocation facility (We're still fuming about it, but we're working to make sure we're better prepared if it happens again). The following week a bunch of us employees flew down to San Francisco to meet our new coworkers and to check out our new office. As you can see, January was unusually busy for us ;-p So, after meeting the new company, dealing with power loss and maintenance issues, and fixing up small bugs throughout, this month didn't leave us a lot of time to work on new or improved features. We did add a new statistics report to all pages served through the Express Lane that shows you the time saved in loading pages. We also worked on comment spam issues: anonymous comments now have all URLs un-linkified, and we pledged support for adding "rel=nofollow" to unknown links with Google. In ScrapBook news, we nailed down an annoying load balancing bug, which put an end to all of the "MD5 Mismatch" errors people were seeing. Mahlon wrote up a new style called Smoove which you can select for your account on the Your Styles page. As for additional disk space, we're conferring with our new parent company about the prices we originally decided on. Once we're done with that you'll be able to buy blocks of disk space directly from our store. Sorry about the short status post, we've been so awash in meetings, bug fixes, and trying to move an entire office down south that we haven't been working on our regular schedules. Hopefully the coming months will even out once we're settled down. I hope you all have a great February! |
