The One That I Can’t Figure Out a Title For

Hello all,

Just wanted to update on a few things that are going on around the site.  This may be a little convoluted, and some of it takes some explaining, so hang in there.

There’s been some more people who’ve joined the OD Booster Club – with some really cool promotional ideas.  Thanks to all of them!

.java.queen.
DeviantRayne
Happily*Living
madscribbler
Mumiah
Proud Mommy of 2 Lil Men
Puddles ♥

Remember, at the end of the month we will be picking one of them to receive a free OD Plus one-year subscription.  If you want to get in on the fun, go over to the Booster Club homepage and check it out.

One of our Booster Club slogans is "Because life doesn’t happen 140 characters at a time." – which may seem incongruous considering that I am also announcing that I am working on the official OD Twitter page.  Even though I don’t think it’s a great way to let the world know about my life (who really cares that I had pancakes for dinner tonight?) – it is a good way to communicate with our members, and with the outside world. 

The Twitter page follows along the same lines as the OD Facebook page, in that the Admins and I will be using it to update everybody about happenings here at OD.  I know there are a lot of other places people spend their time online, and I just want to do the best we can to stay in touch.

We had an unfortunate series of events this afternoon while installing some security and system updates – what should have been a simple three-minute server reset turned into three server reboots and some service re-installations.  As a result, the site was offline for thirty-eight minutes instead of the planned three – sorry about that.  Good news is that the updates worked (in the end), and everything is running fine again.  Bad news was that the start of the work went off earlier than it was supposed to, and though I posted warnings on our Facebook and Twitter pages, they were posted too late and some people got booted off the site in the middle of doing things.  I’ll do a better job of getting earlier notices out next time this happens.

Finally, I made some small changes to Reader’s Choice today – we often have people tell us that they would like to be able to know if their entries make it to RC, and I’ve added a couple things to do just that.  First, if you go over to the RC page now, there is a link at the top that says "entries written by you" (next to the one that says "entries you voted for").  Clicking this will get you a list of any of your entries that have been on RC (not over the whole life of OD – we just started keeping a complete history of RC entries when we upgraded to OD 6 last year – our history goes back to that point).  Second, if you have an entry that has been in RC, if you (or anybody else) views that entry, you’ll see a "Reader’s Choice" tag in the upper left of the entry.

EDIT: I came back to add this, because a couple people had expressed concern – I will never post news exclusively to Facebook or Twitter, and not post it here first.  I know there are many, many people who don’t personally use these other services (I’m one of them), so your first source of OD news will always be here in my diary or the OD front page.  The problem yesterday was that the reboot went off sooner than it was supposed to, so I ended up posting over there after OD had already gone down.  FB and Twitter are just a supplement, to help us reach more people in more places.

Enjoy!

The DiaryMaster