LiveJournal.com

Mid-month news update
2005-08-15

8 million and counting… LiveJournal’s eight-millionth account was added over the weekend, and to celebrate, veroz created this mosaic of 2400 images pulled from LiveJournal. Click on the image to enlarge it. Bonus points for locating the userpics of all the LJ staff members. (The eight-millionth account gets a poster of the mosaic signed by the LJ staff.)

OMG 100 userpics!

As promised, the extra userpics paid account add-on now raises your userpic limit to 100. If you already have extra userpics your limit will be automatically raised. A regular paid account still has a limit of 15 userpics. (Need a way to create more userpics? ScrapBook has a feature that allows you to turn any uploaded photo into a userpic. Go to pics.livejournal.com, go to Manage > Galleries, select a public photo from the Edit view of a gallery, then click on “upload/manage user pictures” near the bottom of the screen.)

Automatic payments now available

There's good news for people who have been asking us for an easier way of making payments. If you have a paid account or want to get one, and you never want to worry about digging out your credit card again, you can now use automatic payments. Enter your credit card information once and stop worrying about expirations. You can select any item, and choose one month, two month, six month, or 12 month (for the low, low price of $19.95 -- can you see the infomercial now?). Fear not, you can still choose to pay one payment at a time, in our newly-redesigned Gift Shop, with what we now call manual payments.

As always, the safety of your personal information is a top priority. Rather than storing your payment data on our own servers, we encrypt the data and send it to Wells Fargo for secure storage. Check out the automatic payments FAQ for more info.

Anyone with an existing paid account as of yesterday (8/14/05) can take advantage of a special offer that's explained in the paidmembers community.

New names, same great features

Speaking of calling old features by new names, we realized a lot of our names were confusing or inconsistent and decided to clean some of them up. For the record, here's a list of the new terms:

- gift certificates (used to be called coupons)
- storage space (used to be called disk space, disk quota, etc.)
- voice post (used to be called post-by-phone)
- mobile post (used to be called email gateway)
- add-ons (used to be called bonus features)
- Gift Shop (used to be the LiveJournal store)

New merchandise

As promised, we’ve also added new merchandise items: a travel mug, a beanie/skullcap and a re-stock of the baseball cap. If you’re interested in seeing a particular merchandise item in our shop, please email feedback@livejournal.com with your suggestion.

New LJ Spotlight community

lj_spotlight is a place where we’ll post about the interesting ways people are using LiveJournal. Discover new friends and communities, get inspired to use LJ in different ways, and learn about LJ features you might not have used before. And don't forget about the feedback community where you can participate in polls and vote on new ideas.

That's it for now. See you in September!