I wouldn't normally have remembered all that, but I've been working on a paper all about LiveJournal and it's making me do a lot of research about the history and recalling what led to what.
Throughout writing the paper I keep stopping and marveling at how much the site's grown and changed from the early days, technically, business-wise, and as a community. I want to thank everybody that's helped. I couldn't have done this all on my own even if I had 10 years... there's just so much that needs to be done in parallel that I never could have done alone. I'm done with school now, save an easy final on Thursday, and it seems like it all just blinked by. Time flies when you're having fun, eh? So good thing LiveJournal was providing the fun. :-)
Anyway, to celebrate the big 3 we're going to recognize this next week as "birthday party week" and get a bunch of cool and oft-requested stuff live. These things include:
Permanent accounts are once again available, for a limited time.
The username rename service will be available in the next day or so, according to
avva
The directory will be up for paid members and to a lesser degree for free users, once I finish a few things. (tomorrow?) I already have two servers setup to do nothing but directory search stuff, completely isolated from the rest of the site.
The new UTF-8 code is running now, but not enabled.
avva sent me the last one section required, so once I review it, that'll get turned on. The end result won't be too noticable, except for international users, but the end result for everybody else is that we'll start using XML anywhere and everywhere, just because we can. Currently we can't do XML correctly because we never know the encoding of text. With the new system, everything's UTF-8 everywhere.

Oh, another exciting thing:
← Ctrl ← Alt
Ctrl → Alt →
← Ctrl ← Alt
Ctrl → Alt →