The LIVESTRONG.COM Blog

Hi everyone!

You might have thought our team would take a break after last week’s round of fixes, but there’s no stopping the LIVESTRONG.COM crew! We rolled out another smattering of upgrades and fixes this week; here’s a sampling:

1. We’ve made LIVESTRONG Groups better than ever. They now sport an easier-to-read three-column layout. You can also post links to other sites and resources into your group entries with a really slick new tool that I think you’ll love. Groups also load much, much faster than ever before. Explore, and enjoy!

2. You might have already noted the new search bar in the header that we released last week. Now, we’ve refined search — especially “Member Search” — so that the results are even more accurate.

3. We’ve made several bug fixes on The Daily Plate. Some members were having issues viewing their weight charts; viewing date ranges wasn’t working properly. That should now be corrected. We’ve also implemented some new measures to cut down on new duplicates entering the database. And today, we’re introducing “Locked” food items. When we independently verify the accuracy of food data, we’ll mark the food as such and prevent it from being edited later. While most food items have a button to “Edit this item,” locked foods – like this one — don’t.

4. Beyond these changes, we’ve improved the layout of some articles, improved our video experience, added an “Experts” module to our homepage, and more. 

Take a look around the site to experience the changes, and let us know what you think!

We’re conducting a survey on LIVESTRONG.COM, and we’d love to hear from you. The survey should only take a few minutes to complete, and your feedback will go directly towards helping us to make the site better.

Click here to take the survey. We really appreciate your time and interest!

As a brand new feature that dovetails nicely with our intermittent “Meet the Staff” feature that launched Monday, each week we’re going to highlight five strong members from the LIVESTRONG.COM community. Strong community members are those who give back to the site, inspire others, or simply somehow make a difference to others here.

1. First up today is our YouTube contest winner, Zach! Zach’s story inspired thousands of you, and he’s truly an embodiment of what LIVESTRONG.COM is all about. Congratulations, Zach!

2. There’s no way we could start our first edition of “Five Strong Members” without mentioning Lonnie. He’s one of our longest-serving volunteer Moderators, and he is an invaluable resource to all of us behind-the-scenes here at LIVESTRONG.COM. Lonnie is the curator of several popular groups, and active in many more — you can see the full list in his profile. He answers every private message he receives on the site, happy to offer advice, help you learn to use the site to its full potential, or answer any other questions that come in. He’s in frequent content with us staffers as well, relaying urgent issues or making brilliant suggestions. And of course, you can find him pretty much every day on our forums. When you run a community-centric site like ours, you hope that you’ll score someone as devoted as Lonnie is, but you never dream it’s really possible. We love Lonnie, and sing his praises daily. 

3. Another power user is draca. She tracks every day, and she maintains a Food Diary as well. Her profile is filled with articles she’s found interesting, her fascinating “About Me” section, and more. Like most of the others on this list, she’s super active on the forums as well.

4. Next up is choseck. She’s been a member since May, and she’s as active as ever today. She’s tracking what she eats with The Daily Plate, and she’s very active on the forums.

5. And finally, there’s dandv. He’s a relatively new member, but he’s already dived in with so much feedback and become so engaging on the forums — that he’s become our newest Moderator on the site. Congrats, and welcome, Dan!

Tomorrow, September 24th, CBS’s The Early Show will be featuring Lance. He will be on their Plaza at the GM Building located at 59th Street and 5th Avenue.

If you’d like to show up in person, CBS advises that you should arrive by 7:15am.

And of course, if you want to see Lance’s appearance, make sure you tune in!

This is the first in a series of occasional posts where staffers from behind-the-scenes at LIVESTRONG.COM will tell you about themselves and their roles here.

First up: Jodi Cararas!

My co-workers call me MOTS (Mouth of the South), because of my larger-than-life — and vocal —personality, which I display quite often as the Director of Content for LIVESTRONG.COM.  Plus, I am Southern, so the moniker sort of fits. But when your main goal, like mine, is to hopefully inspire and empower people to help themselves and then to help others, there is no room for wallflowers. Hence why I proudly embrace the nickname and inject a little bit of “MOTS” in everything I do.

At LIVESTRONG.COM, my days are mostly filled with managing our Experts, deciding on the most relevant health-, fitness- and lifestyle-related articles and videos to feature on the site and ensuring that you get the latest news and information about Lance and his initiatives. I also get to highlight great stories about people like you, create contests and interact with amazing people who just want to improve their quality of life and the lives of others.

It’s a lot of work and long hours, but is also loads of fun. I collaborate with a great group of individuals at LIVESTRONG.COM, who are inspiring in their own right. They have become like family, if your family includes being together 14-hours straight in a bright-yellow room for 90 days building a website that could potentially change the lives of millions. There was lots of love going around.

My other family still resides in my hometown of New Orleans, which means we live life by the three Fs: Family, Food and Football. Though I am in Los Angeles now, I still live by all three. I am a dedicated, die-hard New Orleans Saints fan, love my family and can’t live without New Orleans cuisine. Thank goodness, I am a decent cook.

But, too much of a good thing, especially New Orleans cookin’, can take its toll. So I try to live my life in moderation and my LIVESTRONG.COM goals are in line with those priorities. I try to maintain a healthy and balanced lifestyle that includes exercising, watching what I eat (though I still enjoy all of my favorite foods), family-bonding and some “me” time.

My favorite LIVESTRONG.COM feature: The Daily Plate

A bunch of new features and fixes went live today! Here are some that you may find of interest:

First up, for those of you who use TDP on LIVESTRONG, we’ve added a great feature that’s easier to use than to explain — but I’ll still try! If you click “I Ate This!” and then choose “other” to enter a date of your own choosing (instead of “today” or “yesterday”), that new date will appear again the next time you click “I Ate This.” That way, if you have a bunch of foods to enter for, say, two days ago, you can get it done a lot more quickly!

You can now choose to subscribe to our experts’ blogs. Visit one of their blogs now, and you can choose to be notified every time they post a new entry.

You’ll also notice a revamped search bar in the header. Now you can easily choose whether to search the whole site, just The Daily Plate, or just for members. And over on the Forums, you can find a forum-specific search near the top right of the page. The site is also better about remembering your searches (so that you don’t have to retype the whole query if you want to refine your search).

We’ve made a variety of fixes to the Excel exports you can generate from MyPlate. If you’ve been having issues with them, try again!

Also on MyPlate, we’ve corrected some issues where meals you had tracked could lose their timestamps in certain scenarios.

A variety of other fixes and upgrades also launched today, and we have plenty more fixes in the works. We had intended to role out some upgrades to Groups today, but we had to hold off at the last minute, so that we can make sure we get everything right. Expect that upgrade soon!

As always, let us know what you think in the comments below. We sincerely appreciate your feedback!

Don’t miss TIME’s feature on inspirational cancer survivors. Great press for our friends at the LAF, and truly motivating stories, too.

We now have ten finalists in our ongoing LIVESTRONG.COM/YouTube contest. Check out the finalists and YOU vote for the winner!

Chris Brewer from the Lance Armstrong Foundation has a great post up about the day the LAF learned of Lance’s return to competitive cycling.
 

And with that, Lance quickly said, “Yes, I am coming back to the sport of professional cycling and intend to win the Tour de France.” To say there was an audible hush in the room would be an understatement. But then Lance went on to detail that this was not a decision made in a vacuum. He had consulted his closest advisors, friends, and ultimately his children and their mother, and all had responded unequivocally with a hearty, “YES!” And so it begins…

As some have speculated, Lance Armstrong has announced that he’s un-retiring.