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Saturday, November 7th, 2009
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1:16 pm - Proud parents...
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| Thursday, October 8th, 2009
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5:03 pm - One year later...
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scsi
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Hi everyone,
Its been one year since DJ changed hands and was moved to a new facility. Bill of Warped moved DJ from 13 servers sitting in a soon-to-be-closed colocation facility in Stockton to one huge virtual instance at Amazon's Cloud Computing Center.
We have paved the road for future expansion.
As ![[info]](http://piktures.deadjournal.com/userinfo.gif) cryo said prior, I am working on bringing the current LJ code to DJ. We have both been working hard to make sure that all of your emo-wrist cutting poems and userpics make the journey safely. My work has been cut out for me. With a baby on the way and tons of tests to run on the new codebase I feel like my head is going to explode.
However, all is not that bad, because I do all of this for the paid users of the site. With AdBlock becoming more and more common usage, this site is entirely funded by the paid users who love the site enough to kick a few bucks over for a paid account. Cryo and I cannot express how much we appreciate every dollar that comes in. A million thank yous.
So, saying that, I present to you the DeadJournal test server!
http://www.tardjournal.com (ignore the domain, its one I had laying around.) You may have to shift-refresh a few times if nobody has gone on the site recently due to how the test server is setup (the main site will NOT be like this). Now this test site is slow, Its running out of my closet :).
I am using a very old database snapshot before the site moved over to cryo. Your login/passwords should work as before.
Now some of the features are turned off until we can work the bugs out. Embedding due to the recent LJ security hole, and messaging/email sending are all intentionally turned off until I can run further tests. I am looking for bugs that pertain to the core site usage. Posting, commenting, userpics, and themes. Pretty much what this current site has.
Since there is a new HTML eater on this site, some of your S1 themes may be a bit... modified... in the name of security. Test it out, give it a whirl. cryo will be posting a place to post all of the bugs you find.
Since this is a test server, expect it to be offline and your data randomly loss. Nothing is going to be saved on the test site after testing is complete and we move the main site over, so don't write that Grammy winning wrist splitting entry on it!
If you have any questions or concerns, please let cryo know. I'll be pounding my head against the undocumented code of LJ-Land while I wait for my child to be born.
-Frank
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(11 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, October 2nd, 2009
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12:01 am - DeadJournal celebrates 1 year of being Warped!
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cryo
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In this past year, we have concentrated on increasing the stability, speed, and reliability of DeadJournal. Recently, scsi has been working on bringing the source code up from 2002 to now, which will give DeadJournal features zombies and ghouls have been wanting for quite a while. We will be bringing this online asap, while ensuring that your existing entries, icons, comments, and other data are migrated.
We've are working on improving the reduction of spambots from leaving anonymous posts in some of your journals. While this may be a tad more work for those who wish to post anonymously, the number of reports of spam have dropped dramatically just in the first 24 hours. We will continue to evaluate and implement methods to control these botnet posts while trying to make the user impact minimal.
scsi and niftybitch are expecting their new baby very very soon, so send out nice thoughts to them!
Remember that paid accounts should have lots of invites to give out to your friends. You can follow us on Twitter at @DeadJournal and @Warped, and the status page at http://status.deadjournal.com or in #deadjournal on FreeNode.
Let us know how we're doing.
current mood: weird
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(12 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
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9:06 pm - DreamWidth conversion progress report.
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scsi
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Hello DeadJournalians!
THIS IS SCSI MAYS HERE TO TELL YOU ABOUT AN IMPORTANT DJ UPDATE!
So as you can tell, I haven't been posting or doing anything public on DeadJournal for the past few months. Thats because I've been working on porting the Dreamwidth codebase to work with our DeadJournal database. We hope to have something working within a few months (fingers crossed). Its a ton of work, but I think the whole 4 people who still use this site deserve it.
Here is the progress:
Posting works.
Commenting works.
Friends/Groups and the DW equivalent of "Friends" is sorta-kinda-asking-for-help on the right track.
Once things get stable, I'll ask a few of the hard-core paid members for help with the testing. The DreamWidth crew are a ton of help and I know a few other old LJ sites are waiting to see how this turns out before they update their sites.
Thanks for your continued support in DeadJournal.
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(32 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
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1:58 am - Unplanned emergency maintenance
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cryo
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After zombies (Joey and Ghouly) ran off with DJ, the databases needed to be re-indexed.
After 170 days of uptime, the EC2 instance decided that it didn't like what I said about spammers, and rebelled with the zombies. I hope scsi is enjoying his rest, because he didn't have to deal with this.
Anyway, enough whining. It's back up and will be monitored with a pick-axe.
current mood: tired
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, June 15th, 2009
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6:58 pm - Make sure you delete + report spam
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cryo
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We dropped the ball catching and blocking the IP addresses of the last batch of spammers, but we're now actively monitoring the spam reports. We were thinking about adding captcha to anon posting to help cut down on this, but only as a measure of last resort. Turning off anonymous replies on your DeadJournal helps, especially in communities that do not want anonymous posters.
Your thoughts are welcomed... and will probably be criticized by scsi.
That is all.
current mood: grumpy
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(11 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
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1:00 am - STUFF FOR YOU TO DO.
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cryo
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Since there haven't been any major reports of site problems since we fixed the userpic keyword issue. We'd like for you to test that you can generate new invite codes to give to people that you feel deserve to be here at DeadJournal. To do this, go to http://deadjournal.com/invite/ and Generate more codes (unless you're maxed out). If you are maxed out, make sure that it's because they codes have been used and that you were given more than one.
Then go out and pollute the world with the codes to get more people here.
You've probably also noticed that the site has been fast and reliable and that we are taking stringent methods to reduce spambots as best as we can. A little name dropping of your DJ on other sites, or about how Cool Warped is, always gets you good points with us, and maybe even a few extra trinkets thrown your ways if it's the creative enough.
Otherwise, you can be looking for a girlfriend for cryo because he's been very down since his last one left him. I know you really want to hang out with his coolness, and needs someone who has a heart, low miles, and not a zombie brain.
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(16 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, May 3rd, 2009
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11:26 pm - Database Maintenance 12am-4am EDT
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cryo
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We will be performing some maintenance on the databases during this time. The site may be up in read-only during this time, but probably not while the database consistency checks are happening.
Try not to have the suicide rates increase while this is happening.
[edit: You can follow the gory details on Twitter @deadjournal]
[edit2: Site is back up, and the userpics databases are being upgraded to a newer version to fix the userpic keywords bug (hopefully)]
[final edit: all done. Report any bugs you see (of course, we'll just say you're seeing thing).]
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, April 27th, 2009
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9:02 pm - We have improved the detection and prevent of some spambots...
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| Wednesday, January 7th, 2009
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12:07 pm - We're still here, and improving our service to you.
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cryo
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With the recent news about LiveJournal cutting its staff dramatically, people are wondering whether their journals are still safe under the current regime running LJ. We'd like to take a few minutes of your time and let you know that our service has improved since the acquisition, and we are doing quite a few things to improve DeadJournal even more. To give you some idea about the safety of your journal here, the MySQL database is running on Amazon's Elastic Block Storage on a Linux XFS file system. Together this provides speed and massive redundance, as well as the ability for us to frequent database snapshots which we can roll back to in the unlikely event of a failure. System-wise, we are running on Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud, which gives us a huge advantage of not having to deal with hardware, plus extremely easy scaling when the load increases.
With your paid accounts, you are ensuring that DJ will continue to grow and provide you better service and features. We also invite you to ... invite those LiveJournal users who are worried to come on over and try us out. We will be increasing the number of invite codes for you to give to them and your friends. I recommend taunting, torturing, and other devices to get them on here.
current mood: amused
current music: Type-O Negative
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(35 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, October 6th, 2008
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10:34 pm - Whats been in the planning for 4 months.
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scsi
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Before you freak out, read this then read my post at the bottom. Its something that is going to be awesome.
---
CONTENT: PRESS RELEASE
TITLE: WARPED COMMUNICATIONS, INC. ACQUIRES DEADJOURNAL.COM
CONTACT: PRESS@WARPED.COM
EMBARGO: 10/6/2008
BEGIN CONTENT: -- Warped Communcations, Inc. acquires DeadJournal.com --
Warped Communications, Inc., a Georgia corporation, is pleased to
announce the acquisition of DeadJournal.com, a journaling website
started in 2000. DeadJournal provides a darker-themed place for people
to record their lives, images, thoughts, rants and raves.
"Current users and customers of DeadJournal will now find their journals
on a distributed infrastructure with greater speed, security, scaling,
and reliability." said William J. Coldwell (Cryo), Founder and Vice
President of Warped Communications, Inc. "We welcome DeadJournal into
the Warped family, and will provide you with the great service that you
have come to expect from DJ. We enhance the service with our experience
and fantastic support."
Frank Precissi (SCSi), Founder and system administrator of DeadJournal
has joined the Warped executive staff and will continue to administrate
the site, ensuring that the standards set by him in creating the site
will remain. "I am excited over what we are now able to do with the
site. I look forward to concentrating on updating the source code as
well as bringing many more features to DeadJournal.", Mr. Precissi
says, adding, "This will give DJ the resources to improve rather than
just maintain."
DeadJournal supports OpenID, and uses the open-source LiveJournal code
modified with a sardonic and humorous theme towards goths, emo, and
zombies.
Warped Communications, Inc. (warped.com) is a privately held, premiere
web hosting company. Formed in 1994, Warped has provided thousands of
customers with reliable hosting, technical support and customer service.
All trademarks are those of their respective companies. No emo teen goth
zombies were harmed during this press release and transition.
END CONTENT:-- Copyright 2008, Warped Communications, Inc. - All Rights
Reserved. --
scsi's personal feelings are found here
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(22 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
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8:30 am - DeadJournal Downtime Notice
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scsi
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Hi Everyone!
I'm Frank, and I run this place.
This coming Friday (10/3) night I'm going to be taking the site down for a few days. This is because we are moving the DJ servers to a new location. Thats right! We're moving on up, to the east side, to a Deluxe colocation in the sky!
Actually we're moving the site to Amazon's EC2 service. Not only will this give DJ huge amounts of bandwidth, but since everything will be ran on amazon's cluster there will be no more disk or hardware failures. Plus it'll take care of the packet loss issue.
Not only that, but we'll be able to add more "servers" just by issuing a few commands which means faster service. Also, since I wont have to "buy" additional hardware, we can look at enabling some features such as embedding youtube and other things. It will take a few days to move/sort things out (since as we speak people in china are retyping your journal entries on the new servers... Kidding) but it'll be worth it in the end. Things may be a bit rocky as we crank the site back up again, but we'll be sure to keep you posted as to exactly what is going on.
This is a huge jump/move for DJ, and I know it means a ton to the whole 10 people who still use this site :)
So this friday night, if DJ is down don't panic, its because we intentionally shut the site down so insure that we don't lose one emo journal entry.
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(53 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, July 7th, 2008
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8:59 am - Rocky Road Ahead
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scsi
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Hi Everyone,
Just to squash some rumors - We have been having some major packet loss going into and out of where the servers are housed. Its effecting everyone in the place (few dozen of us), so its not DJ being poopy its the faculity. :)
I have a few trouble tickets open and I hope it sorts itself out soon. Probably a router acting up somewhere or something..
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(11 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, June 7th, 2007
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12:20 am - Downtime 6/6-6/7
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scsi
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*sigh* Hello everyone.
You're probably wondering what happened to DeadJournal all day on 6/6/07.
Another server in the same facility as DJ was hit with a distributed denial of service attack. Meaning they flooded the network with so much bogus traffic (80 megabits/sec) that no legit traffic (meaning you) could get to the site. In fact, the entire facility was brought down by this attack.
The attack was NOT aimed at DJ or anything related to DeadJournal. We were just an innocent third party that got hit during the attack. A lot of us were.
I feel awful that I've had to sit all day and watch the site crawl and die. I have not been able to do anything to help anyone but just wait until the attack either stopped or upstream blocks had been put in place.
Again, these attacks did NOT target DJ, you, or your journals. We just got caught up in the flood of traffic.
Thanks everyone for your continued support, and I'm sorry for the downtime.
-Frank
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(42 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, March 16th, 2007
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8:34 am - Daylight Savings Time Update, Not seeing your Journal, etc.
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scsi
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Hi Everyone!
Support requested that I publish this notice:
If you are having problems seeing your journal or your friends page, it could be due to an incorrect time on your computer. We are seeing a whole lot of support requests come in since the new Daylight Savings Time kicked in. Here is what support is saying:
Support Volunteers are unable to determine the nature of this recurring issue. However, it should be noted that this problem only appears to occur with users of Windows and Internet Explorer.
Please carefully read and follow the step-by-step instructions below, even if you have tried them previously.
First, please select "Windows Update" from your Start menu, and download all critical updates. Once you have ensured that your operating system is up-to-date, you may have to restart your computer.
Next, double-click the current time displayed in your taskbar. In the panel that pops up, verify that your current date, time, and time zone are correct.
Under the "Internet Time" tab, there should be a checkmark in the box next to, "Automatically synchronize with an internet time server." The time server should read: time.windows.com. Once these settings are correct, click on the button marked "Update Now" to synchronize with the internet time server.
If you are still seeing this error page after following the steps above, it is likely because you are viewing a cached or "saved" version of the page. Please clear your browser's cache and cookies by following the instructions detailed in the following tutorial from the DeadJournal HowTo community: http://howto.deadjournal.com/5193.html
Please note that you will have to close all open windows and restart your browser for these changes to take effect.
Finally, if following the above steps (in precise order) does not resolve the issue, please comment back to this request so that Support Volunteers may further investigate. Alternately, you may wish to use another, non-Internet Explorer based, web browser.
Here is also the link to the Microsoft page that has the Daylight Savings Time Patch on it:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928388
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(9 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, February 5th, 2007
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2:52 am
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scsi
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Hi!
I'm scsi and I run this place (all by my lonesome!).
Around 1:00am Pacific Time one of the database servers locked up. Fixed it, site was down for a little under 2 hours. All of you were probably asleep (like myself) and didn't notice.
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(17 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, June 1st, 2006
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7:48 pm
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scsi
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One of the database servers locked up.
Had to reboot it, repair the database, etc.
Sorry about that everyone, its been a really really bad few weeks for DJ. I hope it gets better.. :(
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(34 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, May 30th, 2006
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9:42 pm - Trouble with PO Box.
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scsi
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Hi Everyone!
Some of you (but most might not) might get your payment returned to you via our friends at the postal service.
The reason is my fault. I forgot to pay the PO Box. :(
It sat on my desk, got lost in the mess and never got paid. Yeah, i'm an idiot, and I apologize. The new address is:
DeadJournal Payments
834 W Sonoma Ave
Stockton, CA 95204
If you send me your payment with your old envelope, i'll add on a few months for free as a token of my dumbassness and lack of planning.
On the good side, I wont have to put up with the crap the local Post Office has been dishing to me like closing at 5:00pm (when Tiffany and I get off work at 6pm) because homeless people like to sleep in the post office.
Again, i'm sorry this happened, and dont freak out thinking that we're closing up or something... :)
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, May 22nd, 2006
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12:28 am - Downtime Report 5/21-22/06
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scsi
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Hi everyone!
I'm scsi and I run this place known as DeadJournal.
As you probably realized, the site was down for some time today (5/21 and 5/22).
Short answer: Blew the power strip in the cabinet where all the servers are. They were all powered off, and I just now got 15+ machines back up and running
Long answer: Power strip blew out causing 1/2 of the machines to get powered off. The surge from the power strip blowing blew out the circuit breaker to the whole cabinet causing the other 1/2 of the machines to get powered off. Had to call some people, search for the tripped breaker, and find a new power strip long before I could start recovering all of the machines.
The site may be slow, and there might be some intermittenant glitches here and there as the memory caches refill. The site is mostly up, however I may need to take it offline in a few days to do some backend work. Both databases checked out fine, so there wont be any issues regarding your entries/comments.
This is also a friendly reminder that you should always backup your journal. If that breaker would of caught fire.. uhh.. lets not think about that.. ;)
Thanks everyone for understanding (extra special thanks to the paid users, you're the driving force behind me doing what I do).
current mood: tired
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(28 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, January 26th, 2006
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7:57 pm
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scsi
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Hi everyone!
Apologies in advance for this really not-make-sense update. I'm sick and stressed out. :(
I just upgraded the server code. Some changes include
Schools!
Login Session Manager
Nudge (or as we call it here BitchSlap) a Friend Jury is out on this one. About half the people like it, the other half dont. I'll have to feel this one out.
Also for your account protection:
You'll need your password to add/change an email address.
If you lose your password, a random one will be sent to the email address you have on file
All journal urls (with the exception of accounts that start or end with _) are changed to username.deadjournal.com. This was a paid-only account before on other journal sites, but you get it for free here at DeadJournal. :) If you are one of those people with _'s in your username, if they are in the MIDDLE they will be turned into -'s (like denial-land.deadjournal.com), if they are in the FRONT or BACK (like _cutiepie696969 or butthole_) your journal address will be limbo.deadjournal.com/_username (or username_).
There will be some rough edges, and I apologize in advance for them. Dont leave a bug report here (the'll get missed). Just open a support ticket and the'll be sorted and presented to me for fixing.
I see people posting and commenting, so thats a good sign that the base site is working. All that needs work is the bells and whistles. :)
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(55 comments | comment on this)
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