Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
3. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
4. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
5. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

The empire strikes back

RSS feeds again

xkcd_rss

icanhaschzbrgr

Wii have killer CSI Deadly Intent contests!

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Enveloped in postcards

Photos of the week

lj_photophile

It's 4am here and I can't sleep. I have a knot in my stomach and a sick feeling in my heart over the news that voters in Maine passed Question 1 on the ballot, which repealed a law to allow same-sex couples to marry, albeit narrowly.

I want to scream my frustration and sadness over this. I want to rage against this latest (narrow) victory for intolerance, hate and ignorance.

Instead, all I feel inspired to do right now is share a personal story with anyone who cares to read it.

It's about the day I found God.

I was seventeen and had the opportunity to go on a short tour of Europe with a music group to play in various countries. We stopped in Paris where I had the pleasure to go to one of the largest, most majestic Catholic cathedrals I've ever seen. The name of the church eludes me after all these years, but I was eager to attend a mass because I was feeling spiritually confused. I was born and raised a Catholic but I was beginning to doubt the teachings of the church. "Rebellious" alternatives, like declaring myself agnostic or atheist, didn't seem to fit either. I even took a glance at the Church of Satan, but that's a story for another day.

In the end I attended this mass in France, but truth be told I wasn't really there. I was in my own head, knelt in prayer as I took in the pious majesty of my surroundings. I found myself doing something very cliche... looking up with my hands folded and asking for answers, albeit in my own head.

I said to myself, "I want to pray, but I don't know who to pray to any more. I want to believe in something, but I don't know what to believe in. The only thing I believe in is love."

And just like that, the answer came to me.
"God is love."

My heart swelled with joy. To this day I can't describe the happiness and relief I felt with this revelation. This was something I could grasp. This was something I could believe in. This was something I had been taught in my childhood and could easily take it with me all through the years. God, my God, is Love. Screw all the other teachings from all the other sources. God is Love is my religion, and I live that to this day.

I earnestly believe in God, though I don't refer to God as Him or Her. I can get behind a being who is full of unconditional love and compassion. I can easily worship a deity who loves all its creations equally. I can stand firmly behind the feeling in my heart that I received that day in the church because I feel it still in the presence of my family, my dearest friends, my beloved girlfriend and even from the readers of my webcomic who come and say such wonderful things to me, a total stranger, when I'm out at conventions. That is Love... unconditional and all-encompassing Love, and that is my God.

It saddens me greatly that not everyone sees God that way. It breaks my heart to see people standing up for hate and intolerance in God's name, claiming that God's love is not unconditional and all-encompassing. To deny others the right to express their love for one another in all its glory and uplifting wonder is, to me, a sin against the joy that God gave us.

I guess I'll just have to pray that some of that glorious Love will spread sooner than later, and all this needless hate will be nothing more than a regrettable memory one day.