We're going to keep this short and sweet (Frank and birthday vgifts will be back next week). You've probably seen the updates to our main menu. Don't be alarmed. You'll find everything you need, just in slightly shifted format. Just so you know, we based these changes on input from both experienced and new users who were not familiar with LiveJournal. Our goal was to reduce barriers to usability and make LiveJournal more accessible and easy to navigate. Please note that this is a work in progress. We welcome your detailed suggestions in feedback. We thank you, in advance, for helping us improve your LiveJournal experience.

We've updated the global navigation menu:

Here's a quick breakdown of what you'll find where:

• Scrapbook can now be found under Profile (thanks for your feedback, btw), along with Settings, Stats, and Edit Profile.
• You'll find all the tools you need to post and update entries under Journal, which includes posting and editing entries, managing comments and tags, and customizing your journal's style.
• Friends contains all of your friend settings, from filtering your Friends page to adding, removing, and finding new and existing friends on LiveJournal.
• Under Communities, you'll find links to manage your communities, accept community invites, and create new communities.
• Explore includes search features, RSS feeds, Question of the Day, and FRNK radio.
• Under Shop, you'll find links to upgrade or give a paid account, buy virtual gifts, purchase LiveJournal merchandise (like T-shirts), and view your payment history.

LiveJournal Mobile update:

We've enhanced LiveJournal's mobile site to improve usability and load times. We've made more of LiveJournal's features accessible via mobile, including posting comments, uploading photos, reading and commenting on friends' posts, finding and messaging friends, and more. We look forward to reviewing your feedback and recommendations for future improvements.

Other important changes:

• You can lock comments to prevent further commenting on a post, while leaving existing comments visible.
• We replaced the "Tell a friend" link with a new "Share This" widget that lets you share LiveJournal posts on other social media sites, including Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc.
• We changed some of the icons on entries (you can hover over the icons to view descriptions).
• You'll see a Tag count on your Tag management page.
• You'll now see the 10 most recent vgifts on your profile page. To remove vgifts, left-click on the vgift and choose whether you want to remove the vgift from your profile or delete it entirely.
• We've added options to help you control receipt of vgifts, which you'll find in My Stuff under Edit Profile. You can now enable vgifts from friends or everyone and disable anonymous vgifts.

We've got your fix:

• UPDATE: We understand that Scrapbook was broken by our latest release. We're working on resolving this issue as soon as possible. In the meantime, please be aware that you cannot edit or delete photos, manage galleries, or add titles to photos. In addition, you may not be able to change privacy settings on photos. In other words, once you try to edit a photo, the changes will not be applied, and the photo will be automatically set to private (which cannot be changed).
• UPDATE: There was an unintentional change in the price of userpics. We will do a patch release to fix this ASAP, and we'll refund anyone who purchased userpics at the higher price. UPDATE 2: The pricing of userpics has been fixed and refunds have been issued for the over payments.
• UPDATE: A fix has been coded for the update.bml page display problem for users who use Internet Explorer 6 & 7. This will be pushed live in the next patch release.
• Non-conforming images will now be automatically resized for custom mood themes.
• Line breaks no longer count as two characters against your entry's character limit.
• We fixed a bug on the Manage Tags page so you can clear all tags and add new tags.
• We corrected the UI for the update.bml page so it displays properly in IE8.

Thanks again for joining us. Frank and company will be back next week!

Tags: custom mood themes, global navigation, mobile app, tags, vgifts

wordy_icons
Searching for words to the wise? Come celebrate the joy of witty userpics in this creative, sharing community. A great place to strut your stuff or hunt down the perfect turn of phrase to complement your mood du jour. If you love the art of snark, you'll find inspiration, admiration, and entertaining jubilation.

Tags: wordy_icons

corrupted_wish
Ever dream you'd find a genie in a bottle to grant your fondest wish? Granted!! Simply post your ardent desire and an alternative reality will materialize before your weary eyes. Quirky, creative, and oddly cathartic, a place where fantasies come true, but never in quite the manner you imagined. Shooting star meets Murphy's Law.

Tags: corrupted_wish

cookingfailures
Whether you're a wizard or a passionate novice in the kitchen, we've all had our share of recipe disasters. From the fallen souffle to the runny chocolate mousse to the lasagna that looks (and/or tastes) like it's been eaten before, come embrace your epic fails through photos and stories. Help others learn from your cooking calamities or simply revel in the fun of failure.

Tags: cookingfailures

I know I'm usually super busy but this is seriously insane.

~ Work has amped up it's crazy.
~ I've been working out a lot to try and look good for a wedding.
~ Daylights Saving is screwing me out of an hour of work/sleep/panic time.
~ going crazy with the insane amt of work I have to do before the end of the week for FanimeCon.
~ Prepping for Anime Los Angeles.
~ One more. One more month and I hope this crazy rollercoaster stops. I hope it goes away forever and we don't have to go through this again. My fingers are crossed and I'm stressing/praying/hoping so hard.
~ the bf and I are doing good.
~ I'm sad I have no time to do online things.
~ Finally heard the new w-inds. album, Another World. I ♥ it with a passion!!!! SO MUCH.
~ I'm craving a creme brulee.

Tags: dad, fanime, lazy lazy jemz, too busy to breathe, working harder than ryo-chan
Current Mood: busy

We're finishing up a few odds and ends before our next major release. Our mighty Ops guys continue to slay spambots and balance load times on a highwire without a safety net (which is kind of tough dressed in full ninja gear). Down on solid ground, we're celebrating this week's virtual birthday party with a warm toast to pants. If you can rearrange the letters of your favorite city, state, and/or country (feel free to combine these elements) to spell one of Frank's favorite treats (e.g., pants, wire, paper, etc.), he'll send you over a can of whipped cream to top it all off (provided you return the empty can for his midnight snack)! And, with that, let the word scrambling commence!

Stuff you should know:

We're still working on the delayed/missing notifications issue. Sorry, we're frustrated too. We'll keep you posted. Last week, we became aware that a recently-implemented script was overwriting affiliate referral fees for some of our users. Once we confirmed this, our Ops team quickly removed the script. Please be aware that, while we may beta-test other affiliate scripts down the line, we will take greater measures to ensure that no existing user-referral arrangements are impacted in any way. While we plan to stick to a weekly news schedule, if we have a release in between regular newsletters, we'll post here to keep you informed. You can also check lj_releases for current release information.

To our paid users, we send squirrels in love!

If you have a paid or permanent account, you can send five free Squirrels in love vgifts through Monday, March 15th at 4pm, PST! You'll see both the free and the $0.99 squirrels displayed until they've scurried off to their new homes. Please send only one vgift at a time. In other words, you'll need to complete check-out and start a new order for each vgift you send. If you're not receiving vgifts (from friends and/or Frank), you may have disabled them. To enable vgifts, visit Edit profile (under Profile), scroll down to the bottom of the page, and select 'Do not disable' from the drop-down menu. Have fun!

Help is on the way!

We're pleased to announce the winner of our first charitable vgift poll, Doctors without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières, which provides critical medical care to under-served populations around the world. Priced at $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of the proceeds we raise from the sale of this vgift (we'll cover credit card fees). We invite you to start recommending nonprofits for our next fundraising drive at ljnewscontests. We'll take suggestions through the month and post a poll in the news during the first week of April to let you choose the recipient. We thank you, again, for your passion and generosity.

We've crowned a header

Congratulations to ohterlus for submitting the winning header, which will go live next week and keep us leafy through mid-April! You can submit designs for our next header contest at ljnewscontests now until March 31st. We'll post a poll in the news to let you decide which header will sit at the top of LiveJournal from mid-April to mid-May. All artistic interpretations are welcome. The winner will get a $25 LiveJournal gift certificate. All other contributors will receive $5 gift certificates. Our heartfelt appreciation for sharing your talent and creativity!

For this week's winning photo and more adventures with Frank & Meme, we'll catch you under the cut!

( Read more... )

Tags: charitable vgift drive, frank & meme, lj_photophile, march header contest, notifications, squirrels in love, tinyurls

Brain: Gee, Greece. I should get around to going there sometime. Maybe next year, following in the vein of actually seeing the rest of the world?

Me (exasperated): Oh, seriously? Just like that?

...

Time passes. I watch a retrospective on classic rally drivers.

Me: Man, I miss going to rallies! Next year I should make time to get to a WRC round.

Brain: Y'know, they have a rally in Greece. Acropolis isn't running this year, so it should be on next year's calendar. Two week trip at the right time of the year...?

Me (*facepalm*): You suck.



Yeah, okay. So I do have a tab open with a page talking about vacations in Greece. I'm just, uh, broadening my horizons. Or something.

You know those commercials where one person says something and the other person lists off a bunch of random, keyword related things? They're talking about the bad effects of information overload.

I've never really understood those commercials. My brain's always done that normally. Most of the time it's not a problem -- I just ignore it as background noise -- and sometimes it's kind of handy having random things that linearly don't look like they belong together suddenly hooking up.

When I get really tired or too overwhelmed it gets a little surreal, though. This week, for example. The last several days have consisted of a lot of work stress, not a lot of sleep, and a whole bunch of reading a series of books involving Greek mythology. So when I looked at the milk bottle at work, which for some reason someone wrote the company name all over, my brain crossed it with hundred-eyed Argus to produce Argus: The Hundred-Eyed Milk Bottle.

Now the milk stares at me every time I open the refrigerator. It's kinda creepy.

In reading a news report on the latest stuck accelerator problem the article mentioned that the driver had been told (by 911 and by the CHP) to shift the car into neutral and didn't because he was afraid it would flip the car.

Folks, if you ever end up in a situation where you can't stop your car for any reason shifting into neutral is probably one of your best options. This works for both manual and automatic transmissions. (Note: For automatic transmissions, make sure to shift into neutral, not park. You most likely wouldn't be able to shift into park while the vehicle is moving anyway.) Putting the car into neutral means the engine can't send power to the wheels any more, sort of like pulling a power plug out of the wall. Once the engine stops making the wheels go friction will naturally bring the car to a halt before too long. (Unless one's going downhill, which is a whole 'nother issue. But even then, not adding more power to the situation is still a step in the right direction.)

Oh yeah. And shifting the car into neutral isn't going to flip the car. So you're safe there.

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Tags: cooking