Stuff you liked

• Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work.
• We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more pouring through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
• Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
• Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
• After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
• Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.

You got your fix

• We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
• In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. For more info on voice posting, read here.
• At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.

Paid features you enjoyed

• In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
• This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
• When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
• How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted. We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry in paidmembers or check out the FAQ.

Mixed reviews

• The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
• This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
• We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
• We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.

Missing Inaction

• We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.

Stumbling points

• Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
• A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
• That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.

Full steam ahead!

As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history!

513? What does that mean?

Well, it's a crazy coincidence that I thought was some sort of sign. I read the books The Hollow by Jessica Verday and The Splendor Falls by Rosemary Clement-Moore back to back. When I was popping up reviews on goodreads for them, I noticed something weird. Both stories concluded on page 513. Spooky. So, I figured it meant that I should put them together, right here. They both came out in September of 2009. They actually compliment each other very well. And they both involve graveyards. Again. Spooky.


The Splendor Falls by Rosemary Clement-Moore:



The Splendor Falls is a gorgeously written Southern Gothic ghost story, rich in history and shrouded in mystery and magic. The atmosphere is hauntingly charming and fully imagined. I loved the book and I love Rosemary Clement-Moore. I was a fan of her previous books, and this one is completely diferent, but just as captivaing, if not more so. The Splendor Falls is a departure form her usual supernatural humor (PROM DATES FROM HELL, HELL WEEK and HIGHWAY TO HELL) and is more on the spooky and serious side. She did an excellent job transitioning and her style is still prevalent. Most of all, she is a wonderful story teller is able to create characters that instantly endear readers.

  Sylvie was a ballerina with a very bright future. That is, until The Accident. She broke her leg while on stage and in an instant her entire future as a famous dancer vanished. Her entire life is crumbling around her family begins to doubt her sanity. In order to get away from it all, her newly remarried mother arranges for Sylvie to leave her home in Manhattan and spend some time with her deceased father's family in Alabama. Talk about a whole new world. It's as if time decided to stand still and there are echoes of the past everywhere. Some of them are not quite pleasant though. Sylvie is convinced that she is seeing ghosts, but there is no way she can tell anyone. They already think she's going crazy. They are acting like when she broke her leg, her mind snapped with it. With all of the strange things going on, who knows? Maybe it did. Except that she knows these things are, or were, real and the only person who might believe her, Rhys,  is a visitor to the town himself. With his help perhaps Sylvie can uncover the mysteries of this small town before someone gets hurt. It doesn't help that she's being persued by a smooth talking Southern gentleman and his pack of Teen Town Council members and she's also made an enemy out of one it's most powerful members. At least Sylvie finds comfort in taking care of the garden by her Aunts house, but even that may have something to do with all the malevolent spirits she keeps running into. And this was supposed to be restful? Harldy. But it is interesting and promises quite an adventure and a  lesson in history and magic. She'll even learn a lot about who she is and who and what she can be in life as she puts to rest her own echoes of the past.

The Hollow by Jessica Verday:




I really enjoyed this book. I admit that I am a sucker for anything involving "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", a graveyard and a mysterious and handsome young man. So I guess The Hollow was meant for me. It was spooky and mysterious but also very moving and romantic. I loved the characters and I really love Jessica Verday's writing. There is something about that is very real. It's hard to explain, but all I can say is that her words are a perfect fit for the inside of my head. That sounds kind of silly, but it's true. I am a fan. I look forward to the next book in the series, The Haunted, which will be released in August 2010.

  Abbey lives in Sleepy Hollow, New York. The same town that Washington Irving wrote about in his famous story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". While most people think of "The Legend" as something spooky, Abbey and her best friend Kristen are proud of it and practically worship Washington Irving. They pay their respects to his grave every year and spend their days together in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery dreaming of their futures. That is, until Abbey finds herself alone and Kristen becomes a permanent resident of the cemetery. One day, Kristin disappears by a bridge and is presumed dead. Drowned. That is how Abbey feels without her best friend near. She must somehow find a way to get through the heartbreak of losing Kristen. The emptiness inside of her is unbearable and moving on seems impossible. Making things even more difficult, talk in the small town turns to rumors and speculation about how she really died. People are saying that she killed herself and Abbey knows this can't be true. Kristen was so full of life and she would never do such a thing. Nobody knew her like Abbey, and they are all acting like they did. Abbey needs someone to help her handle her grief. Luckily, the mysterious and gorgeous Caspian shows up just at the right time and the two share an instant and urgent attraction. Caspian may have his secrets, but he helps to fill the hole in Abbey's heart. Together they begin to search for what really happened to Kristen, and Abbey discovers that there was a lot she didn't know about her best friend. Kristen was hiding things and the truth may be a lot more than she can handle. And there is also a lot more to the town of Sleepy Hollow and it's cemetery than she could have possibly imagined.


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<3 Michelle