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 My Stuff, 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:

• 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

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

I love to write. It’s so fun. Creating a story, whole worlds sometimes out of nowhere, just using words. Lines and squiggly things — letters — put together to make words. It’s kind of amazing… and weird. And ridiculous.

And often really hard.

Hm… I hate to write sometimes. When I’m racking my brain to come up with a plot or just something interesting to say. Writing is all well and good, but you have to write something worth reading, right? But lots of people have different ideas as to what is worth reading. Heck, I don’t even know why I read what I read sometimes. I guess if it’s something that someone is willing to stare at until all the words run out, then it was worth writing, right?

Do I have something to say? Well, yeah… I mean, maybe not always some amazing truth or some passionate cause or occurrence that I feel really needs to be expressed, that might really resonate with a reader or whatever. But just thinking something is funny or wacky or might make someone laugh, maybe brighten their day — that is worth it, too, right?

Of course, after writing one has to get the story in front of the eyes that will be doing the reading. The internet, blogs like this one and whatnot, has made that much easier. Still not effortless, though. I used to think that being published in print was the end goal. If I write something that some company is willing to put on paper and bind together and make into a book — boom. Success! I’m done!

Not true. Sure, some writers reach a certain point when the publisher or an agency or magical fairies will take care of the getting the work out to the readers for them, but that’s rare. And even then, lots of authors blog and Tweet and set up interviews and appearances and tour on their own to let people know their work is out.

I guess it’s never as simple as just writing until I hit “the end” and then that’s it.

Honestly, this has become the hard part. How do I get the word out effectively without becoming a pest? And might all this time talking, blogging, Tweeting, Friendstering (I kid) about my writing be best spent actually writing new stories?

It’s all so confusing. Hm… and perhaps not worth writing about, really. Oops.

Writing… freaking writing. Crap. I just can’t help it.

Mirrored from djkirkbride.com.

Tags: bloggy stuff., confusion, d.j. versus the world., writing, writing.

We're gearing up for a couple of major releases over the next few weeks, so there's not much in the way of bug fixes or product announcements this week (other than our spiffed up news template). We promise to have exciting "real news" for you very soon! In the meantime, Frank is so grateful that he can count on you that he'd like you to count on him too! To celebrate his freedom from ice-skating (both viewing and participating), his good friend, Sheldon, suggested we honor the Figure 8! If at least two elements of your birthday (month + day; day + year; month + day + year; etc.) add up to 8, Frank'll glide you over a pair of skates. In other words, if you were born on May 3rd (5+3), bazinga! If you were born on April Fools, 1992 (4+1+1+9+9+2=26; 2+6=8), double bazinga!! Creative calculations are most welcome. Let the math festivities begin!
Stuff you should know We received a number of wonderful suggestions for our next charitable vgift drive. You can help us select a nonprofit by voting in our poll, which we'll keep open until Monday, March 8th, at noon, PST. Keep in mind that some of these organizations (including Doctors without Borders) are supporting emergency care in Chile. Thanks to a user suggestion, we're offering a Help_Chile charitable vgift. Priced at $9.99, we'll donate all proceeds (we'll cover credit card fees) to support relief efforts in Chile. Remember that whenever you receive $10 in vgifts (rounded up) within a two-week period, you get two months of paid account time. A heartfelt shout out to help_chile for creating a UNICEF support page for LiveJournal. All proceeds raised will benefit Help_Chile LiveJournal on UNICEF. Be sure to tell us about other communities that are making a difference in the comments below!
Head[er]s up! Color us dazzled. We loved each and every one of your March header designs. That's why we're so relieved that we don't have to choose a winner ourselves. Please check out our March header poll and let us know which design you'd like to see on the top of LiveJournal up through the first week of April. The polls stay open until Monday, March 8th, at noon, PST. You can start posting April headers (900x90 pixels) now through the end of the month at ljnewscontests. From flower power to April showers, let your imagination run wild (just keep it youth-friendly). The winner will receive an annual paid account credit (which you can keep or give to a friend). We'll award all other participants who submit one or more valid entries one month of paid time (which you can also give to a friend if you'd like). We thank you 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 poll, chile, frank & meme, march header contest