Another day, another upgrade.

Point releases go so quickly, its easy to get blasé about them. But that's really a testament to the quiet efficiency and skill of our upgrade team here at Lithium. Merci beacoup to the fine folks behind the curtain - you make my life easy!

In addition to the back-end updates, we made a couple of minor UI changes to the header and CSS so you may see a few new touches here and there. All part of putting on a little holiday shine here on the Lithosphere.

Also, a quick reminder that the webinar board with Sean O'Driscoll will become read-only in 2009, so if you have any questions for Sean or Joe post them today!

Any end of the year holiday events going on in your communities? Let us know in the comments, we'd love to see them!

We posted a few quick changes to the Lithosphere recently, just before the Thanksgiving holiday in the USA. Some more to follow in the coming weeks, but here's what you can see today:

• There's a new email subscription link on the front page of each of the blogs to make it easier to subscribe and be notified of the latest updates.
• We removed the avatars from Ideas & Blogs pages and moved the Status field inline with the date to give the layout a cleaner look.
• We are now redirecting traffic from the sample landing page to the front page of the community. If you'd like to access the old page, you can find it here: http://lithosphere.lithium.com/lithosphere

More to come in December, so stay tuned!

On a personal note, my thanks this year go out to everyone here on the Lithosphere who return again and again. Whether you are here to catch up on the latest updates, sharing your new ideas to improve the product for all users, or helping a fellow member make their community a better place, it all depends on you!

I think we build some pretty great products here at Lithium, but ultimately its the people that make online communities so rewarding. I can't express my gratitude to you enough, and I'll work my hardest to ensure that the Lithosphere continues to be a supportive and enlightening place for us all to share!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

The latest version of the platform was successfully applied last night! Special thanks to our Upgrade and Production Operations teams for their hard work - I know this was just another night's work for them, but I wanted to express my enthusiastic thanks for everything they do. They truly are the folks behind the curtain, making sure some of the largest and most active enterprise communities out there today are up and running!

Trying out all the new stuff is one of the fun things we get to do on the Lithosphere! Of course, that also means we get to see any new bugs before anyone else as well. As with every upgrade to our service, we've worked very hard testing and retesting so that everything is rock solid. But if you see any issues that slipped past us please do not hesitate to let us know in the Help board!

So now that the heavy lifting is done, I begin the work of configuring and deploying Ideas as well as the new image upload so you can enjoy them. Expect to see these available in production sometime next week!

Photo by rocketace

I obliquely mentioned in my last update that there were some changes coming up in the community. Well first up are few changes outside the community on our www.lithium.com site:

• The navigation menu button has changed from 'Lithosphere' to 'Community' to be more clear. One of those little things that seems so obvious now in hindsight. Hopefully with this change new visitors can find our community more readily!

• We are also taking the opportunity to change the community links to direct users straight to the main pages, bypassing the sample landing page. Two reasons for this:

1. We want to provide more flexibility in the kinds of content we display on our sample page, which conflicts somewhat with its function as a landing page.
2. After measuring performance of the site we are seeing that we are losing some of our traffic at this page.To optimize the flow-through to the community, we're removing the extra click from the path.

To be clear, the landing page hasn't gone away, it will still be available by clicking on the logo in the header (and through other links later as well). But it will no longer be the first thing new visitors see when they come to the community.

That's all for tonight, more to come soon!

Photo by xmatt

Last night the Lithosphere was updated with the latest Lithium maintenance release as part of our efforts to keep our community on the leading edge of our product release cycle. Expect to see our future product updates happen here first!

This was only a point release and the community was available again within minutes following the upgrade. However, you may have noticed that our external sample landing page at www.lithium.com/lithosphere was unavailable this morning. I'm not sure yet why, but it is back up now. Once I learn more I'll be sure to let you know.

Update: We confirmed the community was fine, and it turns out the externally hosted landing page had an issue that affected a subset of users.  As of earlier this morning, access problems were resolved for all users.