Welcome to a Very Special Edition of LJ News.

Moving Day and What It Means for You

Moving What Where?

The long-awaited server move takes place this Tuesday, November 18, at 8:00 a.m. PST. We're moving the site from servers based in San Francisco to the servers in our new data center in Montana. A massive data move like this takes a lot of heavy lifting, and to haul all that data from San Francisco to Montana, we have to take the site down, starting at 8:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning. We don't think the move will take more than four hours, but there's always the possibility that it could take longer (the best laid plans and all).

What Does This Mean for You?

During the downtime, nothing on LJ will be available—no posting, no Friends page, no LJ mail, nada. When we bring the site back up, we're going to ease into it rather than open up a floodgate of traffic. Posting might not be immediately available or the site could be slow to load for a while.

New servers mean new IP addresses, so it's possible that LJ mail might not reach your email inbox because your email provider or client doesn't recognize the new IP addresses. We're working with email providers to whitelist the new IPs. There are a few things you can do on your end:

• Add these two IP addresses to your "allowed senders" list (or whitelist) and address book in your email client: 208.93.0.18 and 208.93.0.50. These are the new IPs for sending comments notifications and LJ mail to your email inbox.


• Add lj_notify@livejournal.com and webmaster@livejournal.com to your email address book.

If you can't edit the spam or junk filters in your email client, you may need to disable them entirely. Make these changes just before 8:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning or shortly after the site comes back up to ensure that your LJ mail makes it to your inbox.

Those of you who use domain aliasing to forward your domain to your LiveJournal will need to create a CNAME record that maps to livejournal.com. Please note that we're no longer supporting the A record. For more information, check the domain forwarding FAQ.

Before the move, you can check lj_maintenance for complete details about the planned downtime. During the move, you can check status.livejournal.org for updates about the site's status.

Permanent Account Sale Delayed

We regret to inform you that due to the server move, the Permanent Account sale has been pushed back to December 4, rather than November 20 as announced in the last news post. After the virtual dust has settled from the move, we'll be able to turn our attention to the Permanent Account sale. Except for the start date, the details remain the same: You have a limited opportunity to purchase LJ for life for only $175. It's a bummer to delay the sale, but on the bright side, you have more time to save up.

But What About A La Carte Userpics?

We know we promised more information about a la carte userpics, and we're sorry that details have not been forthcoming (blame it on the move). We're still planning on having a la carte userpics, but we don’t have any details yet. When the move is over, we'll have more information. We're sorry for the delay.

I do.

If you think it sucks, sign your name. If you love it, be quiet. This is a petition.

I used to work a bit with HTML but I haven't in a while and I can't for the life of me figure out the CSS scripting to customize my Tumblr. Can anyone help? Thank you so much!

Find Your Friends, Now with Dialog Box

We wanted to give you an update about the Find Your Friends feature we talked about recently in news and feedback. Based on your feedback, the opt-in implementation has an overwhelming mandate from the people. So that's the method we're going to use. Before we launch this feature, we need you to set your preference for the setting. The next time you visit the LiveJournal homepage, you'll see a dialog box that prompts you to set your preference for whether you want your email address to be searchable by the new Find Your Friends feature. If you have more than one account, the dialog box will appear the first time you visit each account's homepage.



The Find Your Friends feature will be launching in the weeks to come.

Permanent Account Sale Coming Soon

It's almost here—the Permanent Account sale! For a limited time only, you can purchase a Permanent Account for only $175. Your chance to get LiveJournal for life starts on November 20. Check out the benefits:

• All the cool features offered to Paid Accounts


• The highest amount of storage available on LJ (currently 10GB, but we think there might be room to grow in there)


• No ads in your journal and, as long as you're logged in, you won't see ads anywhere on LiveJournal


• The most userpics available on LJ (currently 144 and increasing all the time with our Loyalty Userpics program)


• $25 of your purchase price donated to charity (look for details about the chosen organizations in the next news post)


• The peace of mind that comes with never having to make another payment

We've been talking about this sale for a while now, so hopefully you've had some time to save up for it. Remember, the Permanent Account sale is very temporary. We don't want anyone to miss out, so tell all your friends that the sale starts November 20 and ends November 26. After that you'll have to wait at least another year for your chance to buy a Permanent Account.

When you purchase a Permanent Account, you can gift a friend with any balance of paid time or extra userpics you might have. Look for more details in the next news post, and keep an eye on the Gift Shop to buy your Permanent Account as soon as they go on sale!

Profile Page Goes Live

The redesigned Profile page is graduating from beta and going out into the wider world of LiveJournal. The design team put hundreds of hours into this redesign, with a marathon three rounds of beta testing. We considered every comment and critique that came through feedback and worked hard to incorporate as much user input as possible. We think the profile page is much improved and ready to go live.



Thank you to all the beta testers for your hard work and feedback. We couldn't have done it without you (no, really).

Montana-Bound

By the time you read the next release, a shinier, faster, better LJ will be up and running on the servers at our brand-new data center in Montana. The ops team is hard at work packing up bits and bytes here and unpacking them in Montana. The new servers and data center are an investment in LJ's future; they also offer more immediate benefits, such as room for more userpics, improved energy efficiency, and, of course, cool new servers. Check lj_maintenance for news and announcements concerning the move. If there's any downtime during the move, exact dates and times will be posted there. And you can always check status.livejournal.org, our offsite status page.



Unpacking is the hardest part of moving.

Watch This Space

Back in our lj_2008 update, we mentioned that we were going to start increasing our local partnerships in India and elsewhere. Like india_sport, for example. Building on those experiences, we've been hard at work expanding our global footprint with a new partnership with one of the leading newspapers in the United Kingdom. So watch this space in the next release for an exciting announcement!

Search Update

So, Find Your Friends is almost ready to go (you can choose your setting now, before the feature goes live, as noted above). But, as talked about in the lj_2008 update, our goals for improving search included two other projects. Where do they stand?

• Search for public posts and comments: We're making great progress on developing a search engine for public posts and comments, which will include tags and interests.


• Journal search: We've been so hard at work on the other two search projects that Journal search for Paid users to search within their own journals isn't going to make it to the finish line in 2008. We're still working on it, although it has turned out to be a bit more complicated than we originally thought.

Word Counts and Daily Posts

As of last Saturday, furiously clattering keyboards can be heard echoing around the globe. NaNoWriMo is off to a roaring start—word count updates are flooding the NaNo servers, main characters are refusing to cooperate, and world coffee prices are skyrocketing due to demand. We had an overwhelming response to lj_nanowrimo (and the overflowing email inbox to prove it), and we're all (except for our accountant) really rooting for you to finish those novels. And for those of you who are busy crafting daily blog posts for NaBloPoMo, keep it up! We know you can do it.

OpenID 2.0 Now Supported

In the last release, we upgraded our OpenID client support to include OpenID 2.0. So if you're a user with an OpenID 2.0 account (like Yahoo, for example), you can use that ID to log in to LiveJournal.


And More

You can find all the details of this week's release at lj_releases.