Drama Queen: LiveJournal Announcement: LiveJournal Major Notes: Speedier servers, Haiti gift drive, Blurberati

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We want to thank you for hanging in there while we upgraded our servers last Friday night (PST). Our maintenance update was successful, resulting in speedier load times and a more robust backend. This will better enable us to deliver the features you want (whose names shall not be spoken, lest we jinx them). We also want to give you an update on some of the incredible fundraising efforts that have been taking place on and around LiveJournal to support emergency relief in Haiti.

help_haiti hosted a telethon this past weekend and auctioned off a variety of incredible items, including fanfic, original artwork/design, and three annual paid accounts, bringing their pledged donations to over $115,000 to charities and agencies, including UNICEF, Partners in Health, the Red Cross, OXFAM, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, and Heifer International!
ontd_startrek hit it out of this stratosphere, with over $18,000 for UNICEF so far.
A shout out to the oh-so-feminine benches of ontd_ai, who've raised nearly $21,000 for UNICEF.
ohnotheydidnt has been keeping a running tally of member contributions for the extended ONTD family, which is now over $93,444.10!
Our own Help Haiti vgfit has raised over $6,000 for UNICEF and CARE. We thank you for your generosity and support!
Elsewhere on LiveJournal, there are a growing number of passionate communities that are doing their part, including camelot_love. We hope you'll continue to spread the word about charitable communities in the comments below.

Charitable vgift drive

In order to increase support for Haiti, LiveJournal is hosting a 48-hour charitable vgift drive starting today, January 28th, at 4pm through Saturday at 3:59pm, PST. During this time, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds from ALL vgifts purchased to CARE and UNICEF. Remember, for each $10 you receive in vgifts during any two-week period, you'll get two months of paid account time (and, yes, we do round up, so $0.99 is one dollar, and so on). That makes this the perfect opportunity to send out those belated New Years greetings, send your favorite snarky commenter a token of appreciation, or send your crush a secret Valentine!

Stuff you should know

We've received a smattering of support requests regarding quirky Scrapbook behavior (missing images) and error messages. If you happen to run across this, most of these resolve with a hard refresh. We think we've got this squared away. Just so you know, this was unrelated to the recent maintenance upgrade.
In anticipation of Valentines Day, we're still collecting stories from LiveJournal users who found their Significant Other, Best Friend Forever, or Virtual Family on LiveJournal. Tell us how you found each other in the comments below, and Frank will send you and yours a Valentines vgift!

LiveJournal drama heats up the crimson carpet!

With all due humility, we are crazy-proud that our wonderful anthology, Live Journal: The First Decade, has won the attention (and praise) of the Blurberati. You can read Blurb's full interview with Marta, our Community Relations guru and long-time LiveJournal ~~addict~~ user, right here. If you're not yet familiar with the project, we think Marta describes it best: "We wanted a beautiful and tangible way to show the cross-section of talent and contributions–amazing "blog" posts, contributions in communities, art, photography, and personal stories."

Blurb is offering LiveJournal users free shipping through the end of February to celebrate (one coupon per user)! Simply enter the following codes at checkout:

USD Code: LJFREESHIP (6.99 US dollars = Free Ground shipping)
EURO Code: LJFREESHIPEUR (5.99 Euros = Free Economy shipping)
AUD Code: LJFREESHIPAUD (11.00AUD = Free Economy shipping)
GBP Code: LJFREESHIPGBP (3.99 GBP = Free Economy shipping)

To view the winning picture from the weekly lj_photophile poll and read an ardent plea from Frank, we'll catch you under the cut!

Featured photo

Congrats to ilya_gorokhov who won our eighth lj_photophile weekly poll. Click here to vote for next week's photo of the week!

Oh, you meddling kids!

Thanks for the insightful guesses on Frank's afternoon repast. In case you were planning to prepare him a picnic lunch, Frank is partial to toasted pants sandwiches with sauteed tin cans, smoked cardboard, and filet of wire, smothered in grass pesto. Fiberlicious yumminess. This week, Frank is hoping you'll offer up some guidance on what he should give his beloved partner, Meme, for Valentines. For those who haven't hung out with the feisty couple, Frank tends towards the yin, while Meme veers a touch yangier. You can peruse their colorful history here. Of course, Frank, being a gregarious chap, would love to show his appreciation by sending the following special vgift to the first 25 samaritans who offer him knock-out romantic counsel.