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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2005 Style Contest Vote
Thursday, Apr 14th, 2005 -- 5:44 pm
jproulx |
We've gathered all of the submissions to our 2nd Ever Style Contest, and there were more than we expected to receive! We'd like to thank all of those who submitted a style, and to all of those who participated. Now comes the most important part -- picking the top 5 styles you'd like to see added to LiveJournal! So, without further ado: Go Vote! We've also extended the voting time to make sure everyone can contribute -- voting will now be allowed through Friday, April 22nd. Make sure you get your votes in! Many thanks to ThinkGeek.com for providing the $150 gift certificate prizes. |
Brad's Corner
Friday, Apr 1st, 2005 -- 12:02 am
bradfitz |
 It has been almost three months since Six Apart and LiveJournal came together as one united whole. In reflecting on the anniversary, I felt it would be fitting to write a post to our wonderful community of users in what I hope will serve as catalyst for -- dare I say -- sincere connection. While I could write a tome about how we have all been working hard to enrich the LiveJournal weblogging service, I would rather focus on how I feel about the past three months, how I have grown as a person and have been able to rethink the goals of LiveJournal and our community. During the past months I have worked to provide subordinates with the resources to attain results, we have developed a cohesive department effort and have kept alert to strategic opportunities. By displaying the strong mental flexibility and by using sound fact-finding approaches, we have used our common sense to reach workable conclusions. As I write this, I hear the sound of construction outside the Six Apart office. This makes me smile since part of the construction involves repaving of the street in front of our building. I see this repaving as a metaphor (as well as a great improvement since the wheels of my Porsche will benefit immensely) for LiveJournal. If we think of LiveJournal as a bumpy road, we can imagine repaving (through improvements and account changes) as a way to place emphasis on customer benefits. In order to capitalize on competitive advantages as well as make effective use of company strengths to counter competitive offers, we must look to the future. Take banner advertisements, for example. Some may say that they are evil. I say that they demonstrate a strong ability to strengthen cost-profit ratios. Some say tomato, others say tomato. These past four months have caused me to realize that there is a need for developing sound controls for greater cost efficiency. And for that Brad has greatly benefited from all learning situations. To go with the flow, to change with the times involves embracing change, and though it may be painful at first, change is good. Some say leadership is about presenting people with an ample opportunity for growth. Others say that it's about giving people the empowerment to achieve improved quality. Unfortunately, in life, quality does not usually come without a cost. "Free" is a highly overrated concept, I believe. Some may even say free can be likened to Communism. I say that striving for state-of-the-art-perfection is honorable. And, when you can get a discount for paying a year in advance, honor is accompanied by savings. Yes, I do miss my fellow co-workers. But I do believe that wherever they are now (and hopefully they all found work), they have been able to to also use their proven methods and techniques to achieve results. We have all won. So, let us look to the future and imagine all the wonderful changes that we'll all be seeing in the future. God Bless, Bradley Fitzpatrick April 1st, 2005 |
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) |
