Our maintenance is FINALLY over! The rest of the monkeys guarding the servers agree with me that there are no site-wide problems.

We will be doing routine maintenance from 04:00 UTC/GMT until 06:00 UTC/GMT. This page will be updated once we're done! Sorry everyone, still working on that backup load balancer!

We will be doing routine maintenance from 04:00 UTC/GMT until 06:00 UTC/GMT. This page will be updated once we're done!

We've made some additions and improvements to Notes!

The Notes feature has been added to two action-taking pages:

• You can now add a Note directly on the Add a friend page - handy if you'd like to mark down where you met them or another name you know them by!
• On the Ban and unban users page (under Account -> Privacy) you can now add a Note, including to a group of users all banned at the same time (so that next year you won't need to ask yourself "hey, why did I ban these guys?")

Other changes:

• When you're viewing your existing Notes they're grayed out; click in a field to activate it to change the text (this page can be found from the header by using Profile -> Manage Notes)
• Changes to editing:
  • When you're going to create a new Note but one already exists, you'll get a warning that you're editing an existing Note
  • You can now delete a note from the "Edit note" pop-up in the hover menu
  • You can now delete notes for multiple selected users on the Manage notes page
  • When you change Notes on "Ban|unban users" page, they can be edited and saved with "Save Changes" button

Tags: notes

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. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. 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)!
5. 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
6. 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!

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Curtains

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

Tags: bugs, csi wii, fck, lj_cares, lj_photophile, notes, rte, writer's block

The heavily armed monkeys guarding the servers currently report no site-wide problems.

LiveJournal may be slow to load due to heavy traffic we're experiencing. Our Operations staff is working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.

The Hero's Luck

by Lawrence Raab

When something bad happens
we play it back in our minds,
looking for a place to step in
and change things. We should go outside
right now, you might have said. Or:
Let's not drive anywhere today.

The sea rises, the mountain collapses.
A car swerves toward the crowd
you've just led your family into.
We all look for reasons. Luck
isn't the word you want to hear.
What happened had to,

or it didn't. Maybe
the exceptional man can change direction
in midair, thread the needle's eye,
and come out whole. But even the hero
who stands up to chance has to feel
how far the world will bend

until it breaks him. He can see
that day: the unappeasable ocean,
the cascades of stone. A crowd
gathers around his body. He sees that too.
someone is saying: His luck just ran out.
It happens to us all.

"The Hero's Luck" by Lawrence Raab, from The History of Forgetting. © Penguin Books, 2009. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

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 heavily armed monkeys guarding the servers currently report no site-wide problems.

The empire strikes back

In recent weeks, we've taken huge steps towards blocking spam accounts on LiveJournal. In fact, we've suspended as many as 30,000 accounts in a single day! We've implemented several pre-emptive measures to prevent the creation of spam accounts, and we've honed our detection of suspicious content. Spam bots are a crafty lot, so we'll continue to refine our tactics and keep up the good fight to keep you safe from spam attacks on LiveJournal.

RSS feeds again

If you're addicted to xkcd_rss, icanhaschzbrgr, or other syndicated feeds, we're pleased to report that we've resolved the update error that was mucking up your RSS feeds. While content was being pulled correctly, it wasn't being posted to the feeds themselves. Late last week, we finally nailed down what we hope was the root problem, so content should post properly. We thank you for your patience.

Wii have killer CSI Deadly Intent contests!

c_s_i

If you're a gamer who loves CSI, have Wii got news for you! c_s_i is sponsoring killer contests. Simply post a question to a member of the CSI crew. The winner will get a free copy of CSI: Deadly Intent for Nintendo Wii (with a retail value of $39.99) and get their question answered by a member of the CSI writing team! There's also a fantastic monthly contest. To enter, join c_s_i, play the online version of CSI: Deadly Intent, and respond to a two-part query for a chance to win a Wii! Entries will be judged on composition and originality. Sorry, but you must be a U.S. resident and over 18 years old to participate. Check out the rules here.

Enveloped in postcards

Last week, we asked you to send in postcards to help us decorate our drab concrete walls. Here's a photo of the results so far! Thank you so much and please keep them coming! You can mail them 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 giving ten random users paid account credits.

Photos of the week

If you haven't visited our new LiveJournal photo community, you're in for an amazing visual trip. LiveJournal users from around the world will take you on a scenic journey to everywhere. Post your own pictures or kick back and enjoy at lj_photophile. You can view some of this week's awesome photos after the jump. Please start tagging with geographic location, since we'd like to track all the places around the world represented in this community. Keep on commenting too!
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Tags: csi, photos of the week, postcards, rss, spam, writer's block

Work has been incredibly slow as far as phone calls and emergencies for me. If I didn't work in the mental health field and it wasn't a full moon, this would not be anything too odd. However, a post-Halloween full moon would generally fall into a high point of the ebb and flow of general incoming business at my desk. I'm not complaining; I'm finally getting a chance to catch up on other things, but I can't shake the unsettling feeling that disaster will strike me. Things are just eery. Of course, that's me being paranoid but in the past it's always been like that; my worst/most tense phone calls and near-catastrophes always happen after a slump. So, I'm paranoid and prepared, and just working through other things (i.e. typing, checking on government reporting systems, updating forms, etc) for the time being. We'll see how long this lasts- a few weeks of this would be really welcome!! :) (After 1 week or so the paranoia will start to fade....)

I'm trying to remember when I last posted and am failing. Trick-or-treat was great. There was a Michigan fan dad carrying around a young child in a skunk costume, so I was obligated to tell him he was a walking "Michigan stinks" picture. Thinking I already mentioned that though...

Monday was good as Jojo and I got a lot of housework re-done after the Halloween party. We bought a very large coffee table this weekend which has four storage ottomans on casters underneath it so we'll be replacing the entertainment stand that is our current coffee table. Apparently the big one is being delivered this Friday. I fully expect stories of Jojo and guy pals holding races on our hardwood floors with the rolling ottomans... I just hope they don't get hurt. :) Our new refrigerator was delivered on Saturday - after a 6:45 AM call on Saturday promising delivery at 10:45 (4 hours later), we got the fridge at about 1:45pm....sore spot? I think so. However, the fridge is working really well, holds a LOT more than the old one in the same space, and we love love love having the freezer drawer at the bottom. A whole pizza box will fit in the fridge too - but we haven't had any to put in there YET.

HR class was interesting and I went to my first student org meeting for my graduate program. I got roped into a bake sale next week (Tues. Nov. 10th 11:30-1 in the conf rm by the bridge between hospital and clinic - in case anyone is in the area that day). I'm going to help out at the sale, bring some goodies to sell, and make some signs up to better explain who we are and what we do....which is educate the future health administrators of America. :) As usual I had a little trouble keeping my interruption problem under control (especially since it was late and I tend to lose control of my verbal skills anyway at that time). However, no one seemed too angry with me for stepping over their ideas and words..so it could've been much worse. I owe an apology to the fundraiser guy though - I think he might have taken a bit of offense.

I'm planning on a girls' weekend with my sisters and probably Mom in C-town this weekend. I'll probably head up on Saturday morning but Jojo is staying home to hang with the boys - we haven't been apart for quite awhile so it'll probably be good for us (especially since we were fused at the hip for months while my foot recovered). We have tickets to the C-town professional hockey game and they are GREAT seats!!! (I know, atypical girls' night fair, but we like our hockey.) There's a Pampered Chef party at DJR's this Sunday - if anyone wants to buy just let me know. If you're in my current town of residence, I'm going to have everything shipped to me and distribute so it should be less cost.

Gee, I think that's enough for one night. My fingers are going to fall off with all the typing I've done the past couple of days. Hang in there folks and know you're not alone!