# Why Use LiveJournal?

LiveJournal is an open source software project, with many uses limited only by the imagination. Use LiveJournal to start your own weblogging community, or just about any site with a community focus. You can use the features such as the support system and feedback technology, that comes bundled with LiveJournal, to run your own online business site.

LiveJournal has many intra-office uses as well, with its easy update and polling features. Use LiveJournal for:

Work journals

  Record what you're working on, or scribble notes for future reference.

Project logs

  Multiple members of a project team to record their work, post meeting minutes, and discuss ideas.

Announcement pages

  Recording status updates to projects or systems on a single page, while notifying interested users.

Discussion boards

  Brainstorming ideas or soliciting opinions with a group, in a persistent but nonintrusive medium.

Weblogs

  Posting links to web content of interest to a particular group.

There are many benefits of using LiveJournal

- Enhances personal productivity by providing a convenient way to record notes in a searchable, web-accessible medium

- Provides visibility between departments or geographically separate offices

- Encourages communication by making it easy to share thoughts and comments

- Encourages people to get knowledge out of their heads and notebooks and into a visible, searchable, central location

- Provides more powerful tools for creating and accessing content than are available for ad-hoc log-structured web pages

A LiveJournal installation comes with many configurable features available out of the box, including but not limited to:

## Features

### Journal related

Journaling service

  LiveJournal's core function. Users are able to submit journal entries and "publish" them on their account's journal page.

Community journals

  Journals that many users can post top-level entries to. This allows for more long-term and public discussion than comments in a user's journal.

Friends list aggregation

  Users are able to add other users to their friends list, which permits them to view all journal entries from their friends in an aggregate form.

Friends filters

  Users can view a subset of their friends lists at any given time.

Calendar view

  Users can see a record of all of their posts in the past, and choose to view those posts by a specific day (allowing easy access to old posts).

Message boards

  Users can enable or disable message boards for individual entries or journals as a whole. Users can choose to allow anyone, registered users only, or friends only to post. Users can choose to screen comments — make them visible only to the owner of the journal — and choose to set certain levels of comments to be automatically screened until approved (such as a user who may choose to screen all comments by non-friends until they are approved).

Email notification of comments

  Users can choose to receive an email notification when someone comments on one of their posts (in the user's personal journal or in a community journal) or replies to one of their comments (in the user's personal journal, a friend's journal, or a community journal).

Security levels

  Users can specify who can read their journal entries. Entries can be public (all can read), private (only the user can read), protected (only the user's named "friends" can read), or custom. Custom security allows a user to specify up to 30 subgroups of their friends who can read the entries.

RSS feeds

  Your installation publishes all public journal content as a RSS feed for syndication on other sites. LiveJournal allows users to syndicate external RSS feeds onto LiveJournal, to read on users' Friends page. (Adding RSS feeds to user's friends list needs "syndication points", and each feed costs a certain number of points based on how many users are watching the feed).

Moods
mood icons

  Each entry can be given a mood, to describe what the user is feeling at that time. Users can choose to add a mood icon, which is a small picture to depict that mood. Users can create their own mood icon themes for use in their journal.

Polls

  Users can create different types of polls, to get opinions, information, or thoughts from readers.

User picture icons

  The ability to upload small "avatars" that represent the user throughout the site.

Personalized subdomain

  If configured, users can view their journals at http://username.domain.com, as well as http://www.domain.com/users/username and http://www.domain.com/~username.

Customizing the display of the journal page

  Users can create journal "styles" from scratch and have precise control over appearance of their journals.

Friends of Friends feature

  Users are able to see a list of entries by the users who are named as a friend by their friends, but not by the user.

Downloaded clients

  Users can download a program to make journal entries (and perform some other actions on the site) from their computer, rather than from the website.

Tell a Friend

  With one click on the read entry page, users can send an email to someone else about an entry, calling the recipient's attention to it.

Export feature

  Users can download their journal month-by-month, in XML or CSV format.

meme tracking

  Users can view a list of URLs that have been most referenced in journal entries site-wide. Users can also check to see where those URLs are being referenced. (By some slight alteration, users can also see if anyone on your installation is linking to a specific URL, and where.)

Random feature

  Users can view a random journal from a subset of users who have updated in the past 24 hours.

### Account related

User bio

  Users can provide information about themselves, which is displayed on a page that can be viewed by visitors to their journal (the user bio). Users can specify contact and location information (email, AIM username, Yahoo! ID, ICQ #, MSN Messenger username, Jabber address, city, state, country, etc) and specify the security level of that information (public, private, protected)

Site search

  Users can search by contact information — finding other users by email address, AIM username, Yahoo ID, ICQ #, MSN Messenger username, Jabber address, etc — to locate people on your installation.

Interests

  Users can list up to 150 one to four-word interests in their user bio, which other users can search for.

Similar interest search

  Users can see a list of those users whose interests match most closely to their own, based on an index that weights both number of interests in common and rarity of interests in common.

Popular with friends search

  The ability to see a list of the users who are named most often as a friend by the user's friends, but not by the user.

Domain forwarding

  Users can forward their domain to their LiveJournal (so that, for example, http://journal.example.com would forward to the user's LiveJournal at http://www.domain.com/users/username)

Journal embedding

  Users can embed their journal into their home pages, displaying their journal as part of an external home page. (This is different from domain forwarding; with domain forwarding, the content is served from the LiveJournal installation; with embedding, the content is first pulled onto the user's server and then re-presented.)

Text messaging

  Users can specify their text message information and display an option on their user bio page to allow others to text message them. (This allows users to receive text messages without having to make their information public.)

Memory list

  Users can name any post on the service as a memory — a LiveJournal version of bookmarking. Memories can be categorized with different keywords, so that users can more easily sort their memories.

To-do list

  Users can create their own to-do list — reminders or important things to do — and track percentage complete and progress on each item.

Birthday list

Users can see a list of all of their friends who are having an upcoming birthday (assuming the user has provided his or her birthday).

### Site related

Directory

  Users have access to the directory of users, where they can search by location, age, interest, etc.

Portal

  Users can use a more complex update page, which includes "boxes" of several other features, such as statistics and birthdays, on the same page as the update page.