June News
2005-07-01

As June comes to a close, we find ourselves in states of personal transitions: some of us are moving across the country, some of us are visiting our friends and family, and as for our product manager Ryan, well he's bidding "the single life" a permanent farewell. Congratulations Ryan and Steph!

Here at LiveJournal we're welcoming new employees to our fold: veroz is our new graphic design intern, working on some new styles and mood themes, and revmischa is our new software developer intern. We also have new contractors working on marketing and usability, and we're still looking for another programmer and a front-end engineer.

New Stuff
In new feature news, tags launched early this month, and has been adopted on a large scale. In just a couple of weeks LiveJournal has added a total of 1.8 million tags to entries, both old and new. Now that people are really starting to use tags, we're looking at how we can make tags a unique part of the LiveJournal experience. Some new tag features we have in the pipeline are: offering a way to convert memory keywords to tags, adding a page to manage all of your entries with a specific tag, exposing more tag information to S2 so that people can do cool tag tricks in their styles, and offering a page that shows you a random set of untagged entries, and some other big stuff that requires careful planning.

On the style front, we added the last of the 2005 Style Contest 2 winners (A Novel Conundrum) and are working on adding some of the runner ups for public use. veroz is working on a style called "Cuteness Attack!", which explores more of the graphic customization of S2, and is available for all users to test and give feedback.

We also have a new mood theme this month! veroz worked on a theme based on Frank the goat, which you can start using on the Modify Journal page. Give Frank some love!

Lastly, we've been working a lot on our decentralized identity system called OpenID, and have started using it more on LiveJournal. You might have noticed the new OpenID pages on the site, and the new comment options for OpenID users. bradfitz has more information about OpenID in his latest news post.

Other News
As some of you have noticed, we mentioned in our last status post that we would make people agree to the new Terms of Service in the near future. However, after talking with our lawyers about it, we decided that we don't actually need everyone to agree to the Terms of Service all over again -- continued use of LiveJournal constitutes an on-going agreement.

In ScrapBook news, we've started to dig into the look and feel of ScrapBook, and we're making aesthetic and functional changes that should make ScrapBook much easier to use. menatrott has been making good progress with new designs, and in a few weeks we'll be working hardcore on ScrapBook, getting it ready for mass consumption.

A Reminder: If you've ordered a permanent account but have yet to send in your payment, we will stop accepting payment for permanent account orders after July 7th. Be sure to get your money in so that you can enjoy your permanent account.

Have a fantastic July!