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 News
Tuesday, Nov 1st, 2005 -- 5:46 pm
ljkrissy |
You probably noticed some changes to the site over the weekend, including a spooky look to the Xcolibur navigation bar. We've been hard at work on some big projects, and you're starting to see just a few of the improvements we have in store for you. Bigger, Better Data Center Later this month the servers that host LiveJournal will be making their way from Seattle to San Francisco (with a little help from our trusty sysadmins and some carefully packed moving trucks, of course). Moving our primary data center to San Francisco, where the Six Apart offices are, gives us more access to people, power, bandwidth, and space -- all the stuff we need to keep LiveJournal reliable. What does this move mean for you? After the dust settles, we plan to pass on the benefits of our greater capacity by increasing limits on resource-hungry things like storage space. We're doing everything we can to make this transition as seamless as possible, but with any large scale infrastructure work there's a chance we'll need to schedule a window of downtime. As we get closer to the move date we will keep you posted in ![[info]](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/http/web.archive.org/web/20051125042905im_/http:/=2fstat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} lj_maintenance with more specific information. Thanks for being patient with us during this work!Share your photos on LiveJournal Want to share photos of your Halloween costume, or your pet's Halloween costume, with your friends? All LJ users can now insert an image into their post directly from the Journal Update page by using the "Insert" dropdown menu. Free users can insert an image from a URL, and paid users can insert an image from a file on their computer or from one of their ScrapBook galleries. Paid users, who have access to ScrapBook plus 100MB of storage space, should take note of some additional changes. ScrapBook is now in the navigation bar, and we've added a new style called Positive Contact as well as some really useful tagging features. Watch for more sort and search features to be added to ScrapBook soon. To learn more about using ScrapBook, check out the newest ScrapBook FAQs. My LJ Speaking of changes to the navigation bar, revmischa and veroz have been working hard at improving our portal feature which helps you personalize the way you interact with LiveJournal. It's called My LJ (special thanks to members of the feedback community for helping us with the name). Everyone can find a handy link to My LJ on the left hand side of your main navigation bar. For those of you who have already been using My LJ, look for new additions including the Friends Page module, FAQs module, improvements to the Recent Comments module and improved functionality.Schools The Schools Directory now contains nearly 70,000 schools, and we're still working on adding more. Our fantastic schools team (do another!) is working 'round the clock to continue refining the directory. If your school name is incorrectly listed, or if you find any other mistakes in the Schools Directory, let us know by opening a Support request. To help us fix the listings as quickly as possible, please include a link to your school in your request. Remember, you can edit your user info page to show your schools to everyone or just to your friends. For those of you who are participating in NaNoWriMo this month, please tell us about it in lj_spotlight. Have a productive November!Update: Some of you had questions about Hitbox on LiveJournal. kevink has addressed the subject here.
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September News
Tuesday, Oct 4th, 2005 -- 1:47 pm
jproulx |
It's finally October; the trees are changing color, the weather is cooling down (unless you're in the southern hemisphere of course), and here in San Francisco we're anticipating the holidays. We're still hiring, so if you want to lend us your talents and become a part of our team, apply today. Styles S2, our preferred journal style system, got a lot of love this month, and will continue to receive affection while we work towards offering reasonable default styles. We've added a quirky style contest runner-up from alsatia called "Gradient Strip", which you can select from the customize journal page. We're in the process of cleaning up our existing S2 styles, re-organizing the existing style options and re-developing the "Customize your journal" pages. In the near future we will be adding a browsable S2 style directory, an area on the site where everyone can view and submit new themes and styles. Keep an eye out in ![[info]](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/http/web.archive.org/web/20051125042905im_/http:/=2fstat.livejournal.com/img/newsinfo.gif){kind=small} news for future S2 announcements.Other News In new feature news, we've added preliminary timezone support to S2 comment pages. You can now set your timezone in the Edit Information page, and view when comments were made in your local time. We're adding this to most S2 styles, and will be extending it to posts and other information in the future. Continuing from the Schools announcement, we now have a total of 25,000+ schools listed in our database, with another 30,000+ schools pending approval. If you've recently submitted a school, it might take a little while before it shows up. Also, if you've noticed any errors or duplicates for schools, feel free to open a support request in the "schools directory" category and let us know. In merchandise news, we've received our shipment of Frank Mosaic Posters and we're getting ready to mail them out to everyone who bought one. We have a limited number in stock and we probably won't order more, so if you're looking to deck your walls Franktastic, purchase one today! And a reminder to all of you eligible paid members, our bonus paid time promotion is ending October 15, 2005. Don't miss out on your chance to switch to automatic payments and receive 3 bonus months of paid time! ScrapBook Those of you using ScrapBook may have noticed new changes to the gallery management pages, amongst other cleanups and tweaks. We're making a lot of improvements to the interface and revamping our tags ("short names") feature, so keep an eye out for ScrapBook changes in the near future. Have an outstanding October! |
It's cool to blog at school
Thursday, Sep 22nd, 2005 -- 3:43 pm
ljkrissy |
It's September, which means many LJers are back in school - including some of our staff members! It's a little bit empty around here when whitaker, revmischa, and veroz are away at school. We won't be lonely for long though, because LiveJournal is still hiring, and our parent company, Six Apart, is also looking for engineers. Check out the job listings. For those of you who are back in Use the new Schools feature With the Schools feature, you can now add schools to the userinfo page for your journal or communities, as well as find other users associated with a school. And before you ask, no, LiveJournal isn't trying to be some cheesy college yearbook site. LJ is bigger than that. LJ's Schools feature is meant to cover schools of all kinds, from colleges to your old elementary schools. We just wanted to give you one more way to connect with each other. Visit the Schools Directory to find and add your school. If you don't find yours, you can suggest that it get added. Some of our awesome support volunteers have signed on to help keep growing the schools database. We'll work to keep the list updated as quickly as we can. Create a school-related community Want an easy way to communicate with your classmates (notes "comparing," anyone?), dorm neighbors, or school team? Head to lj_spotlight for a few ideas and examples of school-related communities. If you already maintain a school-related community, be sure to add the school to the community's userinfo page.Spread the word about LiveJournal We've started a new community for those of you who want to spread the word about LiveJournal. Check out lj_promote, a.k.a. Promote the Goat (we couldn’t leave Frank out of this) to download goodies like LJ logos, nametags and badges. Be sure to share your creative ideas while you're there.Invite a friend If you find out that a classmate, roommate, study partner or professor isn't on LJ yet (gasp!) you can use the Invite a Friend feature to introduce them. You'll automatically be added to their friends list, and they can choose from a list of your communities to join. LJ merchandise is a great icebreaker Wear your LiveJournal t-shirt around campus or hang your Frank mosaic poster in your dorm room and see what kind of comments you get IRL. Those are just a few ways to use LJ at school. Share your ideas with us in lj_spotlight and lj_promote, and remember, you can always post those late night study group photos friends-only.
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August news
Thursday, Sep 1st, 2005 -- 3:49 pm
ljkrissy |
August news Hi everyone! It’s my first time writing a news post so bear with me. August was a great month for us, partly because the entire staff got together in San Francisco. We also talked technopatra and veroz into joining our staff to work on interaction and design, and the LJ engineers have been busy fixing bugs (for a full list check out featureannounce) and working on site enhancements.Invite a Friend We’ve made it easier for you to invite your friends to join LiveJournal. The customized link on our new Invite a Friend page directs your friend to create an account with the option to automatically add you as their friend. They can also choose from a list of your active communities to join. (Please note that this is not a revival of the old invite code system – read more about the new system in the FAQ.) New S2 Editor Anybody who's tried to make a custom S2 style knows how frustrating it can be. Not anymore! Thanks to night_watch and Google's Summer of Code, we now have a brand new S2 IDE. If you're an S2 author, go check it out!Feedback community If you're interested in sharing your opinions to help improve LJ, don’t forget to add feedback to your friends list. We'll be announcing a couple of Six Apart surveys soon, so be sure to visit.LJ Spotlight In our last news post we introduced lj_spotlight, a place where we post about the interesting ways people are using LiveJournal. Thank you for all of your nominations for Spotlight; we’ve gotten some great submissions! To nominate a journal, community or post for Spotlight, read the guidelines in the userinfo.Frank mosaic posters! Due to popular demand we’re making a poster out of the Frank mosaic! You can head to the Gift Shop to pre-order your poster, but keep in mind that the posters won’t be ready to ship until the end of September. As a thank you to our Support volunteers, we're sending a copy of the poster, signed by staff, to our current most-experienced volunteers. Logistics make it impossible to send a copy to every past or present volunteer, but we wanted to say that we appreciate all the help from everyone who's ever given their time and trouble in the volunteer support area. Thanks to all of you from all of us. Hurricane Katrina Our latest Spotlight post was about how people are using LJ to communicate their experiences with Hurricane Katrina. People are posting reports in Katrina-related journals and communities, and even after the power went out some users continued to check in with voice posts. Other users have started collecting donations for their LJ friends who have been hit hard by the storm. It really demonstrates how tight-knit our LJ community can be. Our hearts go out to everyone who has been affected by Katrina, especially all of our LJers in the area. If you'd like to help, there are many ways to donate. LiveJournal will donate 25% of our Gift Shop merchandise sales for the month of September (this includes the Frank poster pre-sale) to the relief efforts. Stay safe out there! |
Mid-month news update
Monday, Aug 15th, 2005 -- 7:27 am
ryanfitz |
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! |
