rahaeli last week, who started working for LiveJournal back in January 2003 when the LJ staff consisted of just a few people. We're sending out huge thanks for all of her work and contributions, and best of luck in her future as an author. You can keep track of her writing career at 
mccuneblog. We'll miss you, D!Updates To Your Message Center
Your message center has a new column on the left side that will help you filter your messages. Click to do a quick sort to only view Friend Updates or Entries & Comments, or you can filter further to only see notifications about birthdays or new friends. We've also added a way to flag important messages that you want to keep in your inbox. Anyone with a Basic or Plus account can flag up to 100 messages, and Paid members can flag up to 300. Later on we're going to launch an Archive feature for Paid members, so stay tuned for details on that.
Visit your message center to check out the changes.
New LiveJournal Shirts, Hoodies & More
We’ve partnered with a company called Spreadshirt to offer a wider selection of LiveJournal merchandise. Our focus is to make the site better, so it just made sense to turn over the manufacturing and shipping of LJ goodies to a company that specializes in it.Now when you visit the LJ Gift Shop and want to purchase something to wear, you'll be taken to the LiveJournal Spreadshirt store. Currently the store features hoodies, zip jackets, t-shirts, tank tops, and cinch sacks in a lot more colors than we were able to offer before. More merchandise will be added soon, including designs with the full color LJ pencil logo, and later on we'll launch customizable options which will let you create a personalized LJ item. We'll keep you posted as cool new items and options become available.
We're also excited to announce that Spreadshirt delivers all over the world (see their shipping rates here). Keep in mind that this means Spreadshirt (not LiveJournal) will now be in charge of manufacturing, shipping and payment transactions for LJ merchandise. To make a purchase you'll need to log in with a free Spreadshirt account, and if you have questions about future orders, contact Spreadshirt directly. You can purchase from the Spreadshirt store by credit card, check or money order, but do note that they will not accept LJ gift certificates. We've retired the old LJ shop pages that sold t-shirts, hoodies, etc., but this photo of
brad and revmischa will live forever. Extension of Paid Time Due To Power Outage
Head to
paidmembers to read details on the offer to Paid members due to last week's power outage. New Safety Tips
Many of us on the LJ staff are asked over and over about how to safely share information online. People who aren't familiar with the LJ community or with journaling are sometimes frightened by the prospect of sharing information online, especially parents of teens.We've teamed up with the fine folks at ConnectSafely.org to publish some Safety Tips for Teens & Parents. You can find the tips linked from the bottom of any page within LJ. Feel free to check them out and share them with any teens or parents you know, or anyone who wants to read up on some basic guidelines about how to have a safe experience online.
Improved Directory Search
Paid members have been testing our improved Directory Search for the past several weeks, and now we're ready to roll it out to a broader audience to include Plus members. Check out the faster and better Directory Search now.It was
burr86's birthday yesterday, and we had a lot of fun sending our birthday wishes to him. Who else is having a birthday in August? Comment and the v-gift fairy might send you some birthday wishes. 