LiveJournal Major Notes: Header design contest, ONTD, Improving site speed, Snowflake cookies
In anticipation of exciting things to come, we're delighted to announce that you can now start rebuilding your Userpic collection entirely from scratch! If you've been putting off the drudgery of deleting your old Userpics one at a time to reinvent yourself, help is on the way! Starting today, you'll notice all of your Userpics slowly disappearing, giving you the opportunity to create a brand new collection that meets your every changing mood and identity. In the meantime, Frank would like to honor the new month by celebrating important firsts. If you were the first among your family or friends to do something totally groundbreaking (e.g., throw out your TV, become dangerously obsessed with Arrested Development, renounce junk food, enter a hot-dog-eating contest, etc.), send Frank a mushy Muah!, and he'll honor your virtual birthday with a yummy snowflake cookie. To prevent a possible avalanche, he'll only toss his sugar cookies to the first 20 pages of commenters. Serious stuff you should know:
- All joking aside, congrats to our homegrown celebs at ohnotheydidnt, who broke a LiveJournal record with over 100,000 members! Cheer them on here!
- Just a heads up: In order to improve site efficiency, we'll soon be purging LiveJournal accounts that have been suspended for more than six months. This will help us improve overall site performance. It will also free up a lot of parked usernames! We want to thank you, again, for your patience while we get our servers up to speed. Please note that if you have a suspended account, you can still download and save your journal entries.
- It's time to cast your vote for Round One of the second LiveJournal header design contest! We received such a dizzying number of entries (75!) that we'll ask you to choose one finalist from each of the five polls below. We'll post Round Two in next week's News so you can choose an ultimate winner. Polls remain open until Wednesday, April 5th, at 2pm, PST. Brace yourself for some tough decisions:
- We invite you to start posting header designs to ljnewscontests for our next monthly contest. In addition to achieving eternal fame and glory, the winner will get a $25 gift certificate. All other participants will receive $5 gift certificates (only one per user). Entries should be 900x90 pixels and should include the LiveJournal logo and menu, so we can see what your header will look like when it's up and running (which will be from mid-May to mid-June). Thanks, again, for sharing your talent!
- We wanted to run an idea by you. We were so blown away by all of your amazing header designs that we'd like to develop a gallery of user-made journal styles. Sadly, the last time we tried something like this, we didn't get much of a response. But given the incredible amount of creativity we've seen lately, we wanted to know if you'd be interested in a monthly journal style contest. The winning entries would be placed in a featured gallery for all LiveJournal users to adopt and adore! We'd also award gift certificates to winners and participants. Tell us what you think below. BTW, you can check out existing styles here.
We're pleased to be a sponsor of Blurb's international photo contest, Photography Book Now 2010, featuring a panel of distinguished judges from the world of art, publishing, and journalism, including Radius Books, The New York Times Style Magazine, the SF MoMA, and the London Sunday Times. You can start submitting photos in the areas of Fine Art, Editorial, and Portfolio now through July 15th! Winning photos will appear in a book to be published and distributed by Blurb. The grand prize winner will receive $25,000 with plenty of additional awards for runners up. You can view the contest rules here. Happy shooting!
For our featured photo and more drama with Frank & Meme, we'll catch you under the cut!
Photo of the week
Congrats to odinsvoid, who won our 16th LJ_photophile poll. Click here to vote for next week's photo of the week!
Frank's face off with Dr. Fox!
When we last joined Frank, Dr. Fox had just asked him whether he wanted to schedule another session. After taking a break to focus on your issues, he finally summoned the courage to respond, "To be perfectly frank, I'm not convinced this is helping me."
"I zee, I zee," Dr. Fox replied evenly, completely unfazed. "Zo, vould you like to zchedule anozher zession to dizcuss vhy you don't vish to zchedule anozher zession?"
Frank wandered over to the window to gather his thoughts. Outside, he saw Meme dancing in the seat of her blue VW Beetle, waiting for him. He smiled. Then he glanced at Dr. Fox's desk and saw the photo of the suave red fox embracing Dr. Nan, and his chest tightened. "I just don't know," he mumbled absentmindedly.
Dr. Fox got up from behind her desk. "Zhen, I vill valk you to zhe door vhile you decide." Frank followed her out. "Hey, I think you have something stuck in your wings," he said, gently tugging at a red tuft in the doctor's tail feathers. But it wouldn't budge. "Gosh, it's really stuck in there," Frank grabbed a bit harder.
"Ouch!" Dr. Fox thundered in a booming baritone, arousing Frank's suspicion. Frank felt a small, pointy object jab into his cloven hoof, which he yanked all the way up to the top of Dr. Fox's head. Frank gawped at the doctor, dumbfounded.... "You're not a penguin. You're the red fox in the photo. The one in that picture with Dr. Nan! Just tell me why! Why did you wear a disguise?"
"I zubscribe to zhe Droidean zchool of analyzis," he blustered in a deep bravado. "I only tricked you to trigger an emotional reaction. I vould have revealed myzelf next zession, but you made your breakzrough early. ... Zo, zame time next veek?"
"Are you bonkers? Doctor, heal thyself!" Frank stomped out of the office into the parking lot toward Meme's car. Frazzled, he climbed in without even greeting her. Meme turned off the radio, the animation drained from her limbs. "My goodness, Frank, what's wrong?"
"You'll never guess what happened! ... Dr. Fox is actually a fox!" Meme nodded calmly at this seemingly irrational statement, having never imagined Dr. Fox as anything else. "He only pretended to be a penguin to trigger an emotional reaction." Realizing poor Frank had been the victim of psychological trickery, Meme leaned in and lovingly locked horns. "I'm so sorry he misled you," she consoled warmly. "It must be awful to ..."
"Plus, to top it all off," Frank interrupted her, "Dr. Fox had a photo on his desk with his paw wrapped around Dr. Nan!" Meme stiffened and pulled away. "Hold on," she pierced icily. "Are you upset because Dr. Fox deceived you or are you jealous that Dr. Fox pawed Dr. Nan?"
Frank clammed up on the spot, worried that he might shove his hoof in his mouth. Again. He is now seeking your advice on what to tell Meme, given that he really doesn't know why he's so upset. Send him a suggestion or post a dilemna of your own, and he'll slip you a rainbow lollipop to sweeten your day.
Thanks, again, for spending time with us. We'll see you next week!