Had a wonderful holiday at the BEACH. We rented a house and brought my mom and stayed in Bodega Bay. We had gorgeous weather on Christmas Eve and Day, it was overcast and chilly the day after.

What an awesome trip. Played with the kiddos and all their new toys.

Truly a blessed holiday.

Well, it's Christmas at last, and from the sound of you all on Twitter your cards are sent, and your presents wrapped. It's been great hearing all your cries of delight recently, as your poor postmen and women have struggled with packages through the snowy weather!( More )

Holiday debuggery

We know there were a few kinks with the holiday promotion. We've been working very hard to get them ironed out. If you have a paid/permanent account, keep on sending those coupons. Here's an update:

• If you were unable to send out multiple coupons at a time, please perform a hard refresh, and you should be good to go.
• If you redeemed a coupon to upgrade your account and the balance at checkout was $0 instead of $9.95 or $15, this means your upgrade did not go through (nor were you charged). We've straightened this out, so you can now apply your holiday coupon toward the purchase of an annual paid account.
• If you tried to redeem a holiday coupon and had trouble using a gift certificate to cover the balance of an annual paid account, we identified the root problem. If this happened to you, you can now use your holiday coupon together with your gift certificate.
• If the number of holiday coupons you have available suddenly goes up (instead of down), this might be due to recipients declining the coupons, at which point your pool of available coupons will be replenished and, therefore, increase.
• If you need assistance with holiday coupons or pretty much anything else (well, LiveJournal related), please open a support request and we'll be more than happy to help!

Tweaks

• There were some initial glitches displaying results on My Guests, but we've worked them out. We hope you'll check out who's been checking you out!
• Some of you reported formatting issues using the Rich Text Editor (i.e., line breaks were being removed incorrectly). We've implemented a fix! Thanks so much for your patience.

Give a little extra!

We're pleased to report that we've already sold over 100 virtual red ribbons in honor of National AIDS Awareness month. Remember, for each charitable vgift you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to fund the development of an HIV vaccine. Once again, we thank you for your generosity.

Celebrate with holiday vGifts!

Stop by the Virtual Gift Shop and share some holiday magic with your LiveJournal friends.

Photos of the week

We're back with more dazzling pictures from around the world. Congrats to marlenemcc, who has been awarded a virtual blue ribbon as the winner of our fourth photo contest. We hope you'll click over to LJ_Photophile poll and tell us your picks in pics!

For more fantastic user content, we'll meet you under the cut. ( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for reading. Here's wishing you the very merriest of holidays. We'll see you next year!

Well, the last order dates for the holidays have passed, and Santa's final sacks of festive MOOs are filling up fast. We're still taking new orders though, and we'll be shipping them out as fast as we can - so don't hesitate to order thank you cards for all your lovely pressies!

Just so you know, here's our warehouse and customer service closure dates over the holiday season.( More )

12/30 Capitol Theater Backstage -Olympia, WA w/ Japanther and Broken Water 7:30 $8 all ages

1/9 The Rickshaw Stop -San Francisco, CA w/ Your Heart Breaks and Angelo Spencer 5pm $12 all ages

1/10 The New Parish -Oakland, CA w/ Your Heart Breaks and Angelo Spencer 8pm $12 all ages

1/11 Zami Coop -Santa Cruz, CA w/ Your Heart Breaks and Angelo Spencer

1/14 The Smell -Los Angeles, CA w/ Your Heart Breaks and Angelo Spencer 8pm $8 all ages

Get to know My Guests. Want to know who's checking you out? You can now view the 100 most recent, logged-in users who visited your journal during the past 30-day period with My Guests. For those who prefer to fly under the radar, you can update your My Guests privacy setting here.

Introducing My Stats. If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can now see detailed reports on how many people are visiting your journal, friends pages, and entries (wherever they're posted on LiveJournal). You can also view data on comments and RSS requests. My Stats is only available to Paid and Permanent account holders, but you can upgrade anytime. (FYI, an annual subscription costs less than a large pizza with everything on it, PLUS it's rumored to make you lose weight in your sleep!) For additional details on this feature, read this article in paidmembers.

Get ready to check your vital statistics!. To begin, mouse over Journal in the upper nav bar and select My Stats from the dropdown menu (Horizon) or select My Stats under Journal in the side bar (Vertigo). If you're using another design scheme, you can visit My Stats directly. You'll find My Guests on the My Stats tool bar.

Happy holiday promotion!

We're delighted to tell you about our holiday coupons, which will help you share the love with your LiveJournal friends! If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can send up to 10 LiveJournal Basic/Plus users a $10 coupon for an annual paid subscription now through January 15th, 2010. Recipients can upgrade for $9.95 (instead of $19.95) for one year by enrolling in our automatic payment plan or make a manual payment of $15 (instead of $25). Please note that these coupons are not transferable and cannot be used to renew existing paid accounts. If you're a Paid/Permanent user, you can send out your holiday coupons now!

Tweaks and Enhancements

1. The search is on: We've replaced our default search tool with one from Yandex, a leader in search engine technology. This means you'll get smarter, more granular results! To get started, enter your search terms and click the Go button to the left of the Find box on the upper right of the LiveJournal header. This will take you to the search landing page where you can further refine by Entries, Comments, People & communities, and FAQs. You can also access the search page directly.
2. Whitelisting: We've released a new option to help you moderate your busy communities more efficiently. If an entry contains a link to a whitelisted (i.e., trusted) site, it will be posted automatically without need for moderator approval. If a post contains a link that is not on the whitelist, you'll be prompted to approve. To access this option, please visit settings for any community you maintain and select the third option in the Community Moderation box (located in the lower left-hand corner). Click the enable link to custom-edit your community's whitelist, which has been prepopulated with trusted domains. You can manually add or delete URLs in the text box. Please note: If you're the maintainer of an unmoderated community, you may see the radio button for this setting checked, even though it's not active. This is a known issue. Please select whichever option you prefer and click Save Changes at the bottom of the page. If you're happy with your current settings, then no need to do anything!
3. TMI, dude: We've added some fun FREE sponsored vgifts! You can send up to 50 TMI vgifts to mutual friends (btw, you cannot send free vgifts to communities). If you're a Paid/Permanent user and you want to view sponsored gifts, click Show sponsored gifts on your homepage or visit the sponsored gift page. These vgifts will only be available through Wednesday, December 23rd.

You can view more awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. Until next time, stay snug!

Statistics are here!

You can now see the number of people who have visited your journal, your individual entries, a chart of comments, readers of the RSS feed of your journal, and the last 100 logged-in users who have visited your journal directly (if you've enabled My Guests).

Things you should know:
-Stats are completely anonymous (only My Guests is tied to username); only numbers are recorded, not any other information
-The times and dates in the graph are based on server time, which is UTC/GMT
-The light grey number at the top left corner of the graph is the statistical outlier
-While the graph may go back in time to this summer, the stats-gathering server was not on constantly, so previous stats may be missing. Today, and going forward, full stats are collected and displayed.
-If you opt out of My Guests (meaning that your username will not show up on other people's reports and you will not be able to view your My Guests tab), it does not affect your use of the rest of the Stats - if you're a Paid or Permanent user, you'll still be able to see all the rest of the information on this feature

( Page-by-page walkthrough )

If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can now send 10 of your non-Paid friends a $10 coupon. Your friend will be able to purchase a Paid Account for $9.95 (instead of $19.95) for one year by enrolling in our automatic payment plan or make a manual payment of $15 (instead of $25).

• All Paid and Permanent accounts can send out the coupons by clicking here (it's also under Friends -> Holiday promotion in the site header)
• You can also send to people not on your Friends list by manually entering the username in the field provided
• If your friend declines the invitation, it will be returned to your available invitation pool and you'll be able to send to someone else
• You can send the invitations until January 15th

There's quite a lot in this one - here are the details:

**Gift a $10 coupon
All Paid users will be able to invite 10 friends to purchase a Paid Account with a $10 discount. This can be found in the header under Friends -> Holiday promotion

**Journal Statistics
Journal Statistics and My Guests have arrived! They can be found in the header under Journal -> My Stats: Full Statistics are reserved for Paid users and My Guests are for everyone!

**New community moderation setting
Maintainers of communities which allow unmoderated posting can now choose to moderate only entries containing links to non-whitelisted domains. The new setting (if you're the maintainer of a community) can be found at Manage Communities -> Settings -> Community Moderation. The whitelist for the community is pre-populated with "trusted" sites, and the maintainer can add and manage the list as well.


**Free Sponsored v-gifts
For one week (December 16-23rd), a selection of free v-gifts will be available. Since they're from a Sponsor (3M TMI App), only Basic and Plus users will see it in the v-gift store. Paid and Permanent users can find it by clicking here.

Bugfixes and other changes:

• New holiday header!
• The new text search is now the default link in the header
• Scrapbook status should now correctly follow journal status when a journal is deleted, purged, or suspended (LJSV-693)
• When switching from the HTML editor to the Rich Text editor the cursor now stays where it was (LJSV-487)
• Firefox spellcheck (and all browser-native context menus) now work in the RTE (LJSV-571)
• The RTE no longer inserts extra list items when an lj-cut is placed (LJSV-583)
• The pop-up item "Type your cut contents here" once again appears when the lj-cut function is used before highlight text to go under the cut (LJSV-792)
• Added language-stripping to the HTML Post an Entry form (LJSV-301)
• Long entries now display properly in A Novel Conundrum style (LJSV-623)
• Indentations and spaces now work as expected in the RTE (LJSV-797)
• Problems between Safari and the RTE have been fixed (LJSV-648)
• Added support for internal tagging of Support Requests (LJSV-790)
• The Rich Text Editor has been language-stripped for translation (LJSV-830)
• The initial setup for TxtLJ now happens on the TxtLJ setup page (subsequent changes can then be made on the Mobile settings page)
• Implemented referer check in the mogupic script - thank you, DW! (LJSV-500/DW-888)

Known Issue: Maintainers of unmoderated communities may see the radio button for the new community moderation setting checked. However, it is not on by default; this is a bug. The moderation settings will remain unchanged until the Maintainer clicks "Save changes".