 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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jproulx |
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! |
bradfitz |
LiveJournal now supports OpenID. You've probably noticed this option when you go and leave a comment. If you're confused, that's understandable: OpenID is a little new, and will make more sense as an increasing number of sites on the web start to support it. In a nutshell, OpenID lets you take your identity with you, proving to other sites on the web that you own a particular URL. LiveJournal's OpenID support lets you use your LiveJournal identity (just your URL) on other websites which take OpenID, and also lets you take your non-LiveJournal identity and use it here. What does this mean? -- leaving comments on other blog sites, and proving who you are -- being able to add/trust/ban people as friends who don't have LiveJournal accounts -- off-site LJ utilities that require you to prove your identity It'll get more exciting as other sites start to support it. DeadJournal, since it uses the LiveJournal software, will likely be the first. As time goes on, there's rumors of upcoming support in Movable Type, WordPress, MediaWiki, Bugzilla, TypePad, TypeKey, b2, TextPattern, perl.org, and a bunch of other sites. In a nutshell, whenever you see this little logo:  , that means enter your LiveJournal URL if you want to prove to that site who you are. LiveJournal will ask you to confirm if you trust them, or you can say "trust that site forever". Never enter your password on a non-LiveJournal site. A site using OpenID doesn't need your password, and if they ask for it, they're trying to scam you.That's it for now. More announcements as we continue to polish our OpenID support and more sites support it. DeadJournal should be this Friday, I hear. |
jproulx |
After a bit of a bumpy ride, we have released full Tags support for LiveJournal! LiveJournal now lets you add tags to your entries when you post. Tags let you organize your entries into categories so that you and your friends can quickly find related entries in your journal. For example, you could tag all of your entries about your pet cat Gabe with "gabe" and "pets", then anybody who goes to your journal can read all of your entries about your fluffy ball of terror. The tags system is fully integrated into S2, in both the public system styles and in custom styles. You don't have to do anything! Of course, style authors are welcome to customize how the tags are presented. (Please stay tuned to ![[info]](http://web.archive.org/web/20050702030328im_/http://stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} s2howto for more information!)We've worked hard to bring you this new feature and hope that you enjoy using it as much as we've enjoyed making it! For now, here are some useful links: Finally, if you're one of the users that found their style reset to Generator -- we're very sorry! The problem has since been resolved, and your journal should have returned to normal. If it hasn't, please visit the Customize My Journal page and set your style back to what you were using. That should set you back to the old style complete with all your old customizations. This release lays the foundation for some really fun tag related feature possibilities in the future, but those will only be as good as the tags you put on your entries. So, tag! ... you're it! |
bradfitz |
Dear friendly and numerous LiveJournal users, I've been wanting to get a list of all high-schools and colleges in the world, since we can probably do something cool with it related to communities/interests/search, but I'm too impatient to go through the process of finding a database reseller and doing the whole tedious price bargaining thing. I even accidentally started mailing people to see how much a list would cost, didn't get replies within 24 hours, and then I hit myself --- am I forgetting the power of the Interweb? I can just ask users to enter stuff! So if you're feeling friendly and want us to know about your schools, help us out: http://www.livejournal.com/misc/sch No clue exactly what we'll do with this yet, but there's no shortage of fun ideas. Feel free to reply in the comments with your own ideas, too! P.S. I hacked this form and database table up in like 10 minutes. My apologies if it's the ugliest thing you've ever seen. I'm not a designer. :-) |
jproulx |
Tonight (starting at Midnight EST), Permanent Accounts will be available for purchase from our Payment Center -- look for the "Permanent Account ($150 USD)" option from the "Item" menu to add it to your order. Remember that this sale is only valid for the next 24 hours (ends tomorrow night at Midnight EST), so if you want a permanent account snag one now! Permanent Accounts get all of the features that paid users get, and more! As an added bonus to the sale, we've bumped up the maximum number of Permanent Account user picture icons from 50 to 100. Paid users will be able to upgrade to 100 user pictures in the near future, but for now it's exclusive to Permanent Accounts. ( Please note: ) |
