Special Edition News Post, Part 2
Independent Minds at LiveJournal
We're very pleased to announce that our global footprint just got a little bigger with the launch of Independent Minds, our new partnership with The Independent, one of the UK's leading newspapers. At Independent Minds you can find original journals from the reporters at The Independent, where they discuss their stories, share behind-the-scenes insights, and engage directly with Independent readers and LJ users. Have an opinion about a story? Now you can comment about it directly on the journalist's journal. You can read what The Independent has to say about this new partnership here.
This marks our first attempt to engage on the ground in the UK. In addition to Independent Minds, we have launched lj_uk, a new official community to hear directly from the thousands of LJers in the UK. Our partnership with The Independent is our main area of focus now and we'll have more features to add soon. We look forward to hearing from you about other ideas and suggestions you might have for enhancing LJ in the UK.
Changes to the LiveJournal Privacy Policy
We're amending our Privacy Policy to catch up to our current practices regarding third-party advertising, cookies, and web beacons (including HitBox). Please see this post in lj_biz for a full description of the changes.
Permanent Account Sale
As we mentioned in the last news post, the Permanent Account Sale starts on December 4. For this go-round, the sale applies to personal journals only. For just $175, you can have LJ for life. What's included in $175? All the features of a Paid Account, plus:
Give More Returns
December is almost here, which can only mean one thing-the Give More sale is back! For the month of December, when you give someone a gift of Paid Account time, they'll get the userpic add-on for free! So if, for example, you were a very kind and generous person and gave someone the gift of a 12-month Paid Account, that lucky person would automatically be upgraded to 100 userpics for those 12 months.
Give More starts on December 1 at 12:00 a.m. PST and ends December 31 at 11:59 p.m. PST. The offer only applies to gifts purchased for other users, not to paid time you purchase for yourself. 'Tis the season of giving, after all. Why not give a Friend the gift that gives more?
Head on over to the Gift Shop and get your holiday shopping done early!
And the Laptop Goes to . . .
Congratulations to Tupelo Hassman, winner of the Grand Prize LiveJournal Laptop at the NaNoWriMo Write-a-thon. Tupelo raised over $3000 for NaNo's Young Writers Program and took home a beautiful ruby red Dell Studio laptop to match her lovely red dress. Yay, Tupelo!
All Moved In
The move is over! LJ is happily settled at our new homestead in Montana and we have almost all the bits and bytes unpacked and in their proper places. Congratulations to our awesome Ops team and all the engineers for a job well done. We hope you notice a marked improvement in performance on the site. Here are some recent metrics that show the effects of the move:
IP Address Update
In last week's Special Edition News Post, we told you to update your whitelist with two new IP addresses for LiveJournal, so comments notifications and LJ mail could keep making it to your email inbox. One of them, ahem, was missing an important digit in the address. The two IP addresses should be 208.93.0.128 and 208.93.0.50. We apologize for the mistake. It seems Frank was nibbling on the piece of paper that had the addresses on it.
Notifications
There's another reason you might not be receiving notifications from LJ. Due to the volume of mail that LiveJournal sends out, a few ISPs responded to our change of address by blacklisting our servers. We've been working with them to restore mail delivery for our users. Currently, the main problem still being reported is delivery to Hotmail/MSN addresses, and they have agreed to whitelist us in the next 24 hours or so. Other users might also be experiencing a delay due to our backlog in delivering to Hotmail, and that should also clear up in the next 24 to 48 hours.
The Atom Stream Has Moved
As a result of the server move, our Atom stream is moving. If you know what "Atom stream" means, then you'll probably want to know the new address. The URL for the new Atom stream is: http://atom.services.livejournal.com/atom-stream.xml. For more information about the Atom stream move, check out this post in lj_labs.
We're very pleased to announce that our global footprint just got a little bigger with the launch of Independent Minds, our new partnership with The Independent, one of the UK's leading newspapers. At Independent Minds you can find original journals from the reporters at The Independent, where they discuss their stories, share behind-the-scenes insights, and engage directly with Independent readers and LJ users. Have an opinion about a story? Now you can comment about it directly on the journalist's journal. You can read what The Independent has to say about this new partnership here.
This marks our first attempt to engage on the ground in the UK. In addition to Independent Minds, we have launched lj_uk, a new official community to hear directly from the thousands of LJers in the UK. Our partnership with The Independent is our main area of focus now and we'll have more features to add soon. We look forward to hearing from you about other ideas and suggestions you might have for enhancing LJ in the UK.
Changes to the LiveJournal Privacy Policy
We're amending our Privacy Policy to catch up to our current practices regarding third-party advertising, cookies, and web beacons (including HitBox). Please see this post in lj_biz for a full description of the changes.
Permanent Account Sale
As we mentioned in the last news post, the Permanent Account Sale starts on December 4. For this go-round, the sale applies to personal journals only. For just $175, you can have LJ for life. What's included in $175? All the features of a Paid Account, plus:
- The most storage available on LiveJournal (now a whopping 15GB)
- The most userpics available on LJ (boosted to 150, and that's not even counting Loyalty Userpics, which can add up to another 44 to your 150)
- EDIT: Once the sale begins on December 4, the userpic and storage limits will be increased for all Permanent Accounts.
- $25 of your purchase price donated to charity (look for details about the designated organizations in the December 4 news post).
Give More Returns
December is almost here, which can only mean one thing-the Give More sale is back! For the month of December, when you give someone a gift of Paid Account time, they'll get the userpic add-on for free! So if, for example, you were a very kind and generous person and gave someone the gift of a 12-month Paid Account, that lucky person would automatically be upgraded to 100 userpics for those 12 months.
Give More starts on December 1 at 12:00 a.m. PST and ends December 31 at 11:59 p.m. PST. The offer only applies to gifts purchased for other users, not to paid time you purchase for yourself. 'Tis the season of giving, after all. Why not give a Friend the gift that gives more?
Head on over to the Gift Shop and get your holiday shopping done early!
And the Laptop Goes to . . .
Congratulations to Tupelo Hassman, winner of the Grand Prize LiveJournal Laptop at the NaNoWriMo Write-a-thon. Tupelo raised over $3000 for NaNo's Young Writers Program and took home a beautiful ruby red Dell Studio laptop to match her lovely red dress. Yay, Tupelo!
All Moved In
The move is over! LJ is happily settled at our new homestead in Montana and we have almost all the bits and bytes unpacked and in their proper places. Congratulations to our awesome Ops team and all the engineers for a job well done. We hope you notice a marked improvement in performance on the site. Here are some recent metrics that show the effects of the move:
- The percentage of people seeing the page load in less than 2 seconds increased from 8.58% to 12.53% (a 46% improvement!)
- The percentage of people seeing the page load in 2 to 8 seconds increased from 66.75% to 72.33% (an 8% improvement!)
IP Address Update
In last week's Special Edition News Post, we told you to update your whitelist with two new IP addresses for LiveJournal, so comments notifications and LJ mail could keep making it to your email inbox. One of them, ahem, was missing an important digit in the address. The two IP addresses should be 208.93.0.128 and 208.93.0.50. We apologize for the mistake. It seems Frank was nibbling on the piece of paper that had the addresses on it.
Notifications
There's another reason you might not be receiving notifications from LJ. Due to the volume of mail that LiveJournal sends out, a few ISPs responded to our change of address by blacklisting our servers. We've been working with them to restore mail delivery for our users. Currently, the main problem still being reported is delivery to Hotmail/MSN addresses, and they have agreed to whitelist us in the next 24 hours or so. Other users might also be experiencing a delay due to our backlog in delivering to Hotmail, and that should also clear up in the next 24 to 48 hours.
The Atom Stream Has Moved
As a result of the server move, our Atom stream is moving. If you know what "Atom stream" means, then you'll probably want to know the new address. The URL for the new Atom stream is: http://atom.services.livejournal.com/atom-stream.xml. For more information about the Atom stream move, check out this post in lj_labs.