New LiveJournal Merchandise Store, Anniversary Design Contest, and Paid Time Extension
New Store, New Gear—Check out the goods at the new store for LJ merchandise.

Theme Design Contest—Show off your design skills to all of LJ.

Outage—We're sorry. We want to make it up to you.

Welcome to a Special Edition Birthday News Post—we have a few happy things to share with you as we continue our yearlong celebration of LiveJournal's 10th birthday. Read on to get dressed up, strut your creative stuff, and make up for lost time.



Prepare to Be Zazzled

One of our best birthday presents is the brand-new LiveJournal store hosted by Zazzle. Zazzle lets you customize just about anything you could want, which makes it perfect for LiveJournal merchandise. The awesome selection of LJ gear includes everything from the classic hoody to a thoughtful tote bag. You can even declare your love for LJ in Japanese, or wear your heart on your shirt (or your dog's shirt.) If you want to go the classy route, check out the embroidered shirts and hats. The only challenging thing about the new store is deciding which new design is your favorite (we love them all, of course).



After you've selected your unique blend of logo, shirt, and color, add your own special flair via tagline, journal URL, or any image or text by clicking the "Customize it" button!



It gets even better—Zazzle has international shipping to 67 countries. Whether you're in Afghanistan or Zimbabwe, you can get your LJ gear delivered right to your door. So check out the new store and let us know what you think!

Birthday Theme Design Contest

Are you ready to dazzle us with your amazing design skills? As of the moment this news release is posted, submissions are now open for the official LiveJournal Birthday Celebration Theme Design Contest. Here's the official scoop:

Who: You!

What: Create a new theme for the Minimalism style. Your design can be based on LiveJournal or LiveJournal's 10th birthday, but it's not required. You can submit a design based on anything you feel inspired by (as long as it's safe for work).

How: You can create your theme using CSS, S2, images for backgrounds or headers, or any other way that works for you. We'll code the winning styles into S2 for you.

Where: Submit your design by making a new post in the lj_turns10 community.

When: The contest opens for entries beginning now and ending at 11:59 p.m. PST on September 14th. Then we'll make a poll in lj_turns10 with all the eligible entries and you'll be able to vote on your favorites.

Why: The top 5 vote-getting themes will be added to the available themes for all LJ users. The theme with the most votes will also become the default theme for all new users through the rest of 2009. And the LJ staff will select a Staff Choice winner. All six winners will receive credit (by full name or username, whichever you prefer) on the "Select a Theme" section of the customization area, as well as adoration, fame, and the respect of your peers.

Check out this post in the lj_turns10 community for the nitty-gritty rules and requirements. We can't wait to see your designs.

It's on Us

As you might be aware, LiveJournal (along with Twitter, Facebook, and a number of other sites) experienced some outages and slowness starting Thursday August 6th and continuing periodically over the next few days due to a series of DDoS attacks. Some of you may have been unable to access LiveJournal or encountered considerable load times when using the site.

We apologize for any inconvenience or frustration that might have resulted from the outage. The cause was out of our control, but we definitely feel your pain at the forced break from LiveJournal, particularly those of you with Paid accounts. Your LJ time is money, after all. To make up for it, we're offering a 3-day extension of Paid account time to our Paid members. All users with active Paid accounts as of Thursday, August 6, 2009, are eligible for the extension. You can find full details on the extension and how to claim it in this post over at paidmembers.