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LiveJournal Permanent Account

Dec 5, 2008 Blogging Tools 1 Comment

Every once in a while Live Journal releases a Permanent Account, which gives you a paid LJ account for life. All paid LJ accounts get (found here):

  • Ability to customize layout entirely
  • Access to additional styles (premade designs)
  • Access to 50 links (as opposed to 10 in basic accounts)
  • 30 userpics (instead of the 6 in basic accounts)
  • Ability to purchase more userpics (up to 70 more)
  • Ability to browse through userpics when posting or commenting
  • Ability to create custom mood themes
  • Insert polls into your journal
  • Access to all features of embedding your journal into your home page
  • An email forwarder (@livejournal.com)
  • Access to the text messaging feature
  • Ability to see up to 100 recent comments (instead of the 10 in basic accounts)
  • Access your friends of friends list
  • Ability to filter entries according to security
  • Ability to notify weblogs.com of your entries
  • Access to scrapbook w/2Gb Storage & full journal integration
  • Ability to mobile post and voice post
  • Access to the Directory of LJ users
  • Ability to create new syndicated accounts
  • Ability to receive email copies of comments you make
  • Ability to view popular members amongst your friends
  • Access to ‘Express Lane’ which allows sites to load faster
  • Ability to add up to 2000 friends (only 1000 in basic)
  • Ability to change security settings of multiple entries at once
  • Ability to edit comments you’ve made

However, for this special deal they’re adding on to the permanent accounts by offering:

  • 15Gb Storage
  • 150 + the maximum number of loyalty user pics (the most ever on LJ)
  • $25 donated to the charity of your choice
  • No ads on your journal or any you view while logged in
  • Never having to pay for your LJ account again

Live Journal will be sending out links to those who have bought new permanent accounts to their partner razoo.com so they can choose which charity to send their $25 to. So in the interest of the giving season, make sure to get someone you live their own Live Journal Permanent Account, and send that $25 to some hungry or sick children. Or, only be half as giving and buy one for yourself..

I’ve been getting emails from Live Journal and deleting them for well over a year now, without even really realizing that I have a Live Journal. Or maybe two? So I decided to look up my account and see what kind of teenie bopper crap I put up there for the world to see. So they finally sent me my username and I looked it up. My Live Journal is actually not too bad, and there’s a voice post so you can hear how I sound half my age. No posts since October 2006, but it might be something I could get into again (I’m not spending $175 on it, though).

Know When You’re Down

Dec 3, 2008 Resources 3 Comments

It’s a good thing for your site to be up all the time when advertisers are paying to be viewed and you want a good reader base. It’s also important if you’re selling a product from your website because, obviously, if your site isn’t there, no one can order.

Yesterday I was trying to find out why someone was having an issue loading their site. The issue is pretty common for them, but I rarely ever experience it. So I went to my good ol’ Pingdom Tools to see how long their site takes to load for another high speed server. It took 18 seconds to load the entire page, start to finish. It had to load 850KB, which was a total of 145 objects. So for fun, I put in The Blog World. This site listed 35 objects at 85KB and took 10 seconds to load.  That tells me that her site, which is 10x bigger than mine, only takes 2x as long to load. Her website loads for me in 3 seconds, which is amazing if you consider how many images she has on her index alone (135).

It’s a fun little tool, but not the great service I’ve come to tell you all about. The service I utilize is the uptime monitor. They offer a 30 day free trial to help you monitor your website’s uptime. You will know each time your site is down and how long. If you’re hosted by a shared hosting company, I would set it to only let you know if your site is down longer than 15 minutes, because servers do need updates and need to be rebooted from time to time (updating the kernel, which is a huge security concern requires a reboot). For my own server I have it set to let me know if it errors twice and it checks every 5 minutes. You can have it check as little as every 1 minute or as much as every 60 minutes. It will send the alerts to you via email or SMS (or if you’re clever, you can put in your cell phone’s email address, they all have one).

Try it out, it’s free. And if you like it, they have a promotion for a huge discount off your first invoice.

December Advertising

Dec 2, 2008 TBW Only Leave a comment

As you can see, I’m still working on buliding up this site again. But this great wordpress theme I’ve chosen has a spot for advertising, so I thought I’d put it out there. For the month of December, advertising on TBW will be free. Any takers?

Please reply here if you’re interested and I’ll email you back. Have a 125×125 banner ready. As a matter of fact, feel free to list it in your comment for faster advertising. There are only 3 spots, so act fast. I’m almost done customizing the layout so I’ll be marketing the blog soon. My goal by the end of December is to have 45 readers to the RSS. I don’t know if that’s ambitious or not, but I definitely think I can do it. It looks like I have 36 left over from back in the day. Not too shabby.

Yes, so.. anyway.. comment here if you would like me to advertise your site on the right there (for free) or if you would like your site/company mentioned on this blog. Hope to hear from some of you soon.

Fontalicious is Back

Dec 2, 2008 Resources Leave a comment

Most of you on the web probably aren’t as old school as I am, but some of you might remember Fontalicious. They had the coolest, grooviest fonts and they were all free. Well, I just got an email (actually, I apparently got it a week and a half ago) that they’re back with some old fonts and some new fonts, some paid fonts and some free fonts. You have to kinda sing that to a tune.

I think right now my favorite new font has to be Blonk. It reminds me of Pacman, kinda. I’m just sitting here trying to think of something to use it for. Maybe it’s just me, but I think it may be good for Lala Land. As far as pixel fonts go, I think this Pixel Pirate has to be the coolest. And I was real excited to see my old favorite, Cheri, still makes the cut.

I just wanted to send out some link love to this great site that I enjoyed so many years ago (8?) and let everyone know that it’s back with some great new fonts (which all look like their from old movies or games).

Ultimate Blogging Laptop

Dec 1, 2008 Technology Leave a comment

HP Mini LaptopOkay, maybe ultimate is a strong word, but with it’s compact size and lack of weight (2.25lbs, I think my iPhone weighs more than that) it’s definitely perfect for blogging. I know that I’ve been out somewhere and had a spark of inspiration, but wasn’t willing to lug out my huge 12lb laptop just to make a note. And unlike mine, this one is small enough to fit in my bag.

Now, I say it’s good for blogging because the Mini doesn’t have a lot of power. Actually, it comes with a 1.6Ghz Processor and 512MB RAM (upgradeable to 1GB). It also comes with Windows XP instead of Vista, because Vista requires a minimum of 2GB RAM. It also has an integrated webcam/mic, just in case you need to make an on-the-spot webcast.

When I saw this little thing in the HP Catalog for only $399.99 I instantly thought about bloggers. I bet that’s what they had in mind, too. And if you add $29.99 you can get a premium stereo headset, also good for watching videos on YouTube or listening to music on long trips. The memory is removeable (8GB, 16GB flash drive) so you can import everything to your main PC when you get home. Nifty little thing, eh?

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