23’s network provider is down for a routine maintenance the coming hours - we’ll keep you update when the maintenance slot is done.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: We now have network access again and should be up and running in minutes.

Since we’re pretty unhappy to say the least of this to us unscheduled maintenance time we’ve all ready made the decision to switch our network provider as soon as possible - since apart from a huge physical move from one datacenter to another our only downtime has been two 6-8 hours network outages from our network provider.

We are trying an experiment with a new rotation mechanism that is a lot faster than the current image-level rotation, by using direct manipulation of the JPEG blocks. There seem to be some problems with it, particularly around the edges of photos, so those of you who are tired of slow rotations can try it out and see what you think.

Visit this link to enable the fast rotation for the rest of your session. Then rotate some photos! For most photos it should be noticeably faster, but there may also be some quality problems. Feel free to post comments or complaints here.

One note: For rotations that take the photo back to the original, we still do a traditional mogrify based rotate.

A while back we added the ability to theme 23 accounts. It’s easy: You can choose between some basic colour variations on the standard 23 design, or you can add you own personal touch by CSS designing your profile to your heart’s content.

I’ve seen a few very radical themes over the past month or two, but it seems that people have gotten over the initial urge to go all out and redesign everything. Instead users have started to post moderately improved variations of 23. Take for example these accounts:

23hq.com/mach

23hq.com/andjohan

23hq.com/Volker

(And then, of course, there’s my own variation, which is currently a copy of Mach’s styling coupled with an enhanced buddy icon — just for the sake of narcissism.)

Inspired by these developments, we’ve just added a “Steal this theme” link in the bottom right corner of every user’s page. This should give anyone a starting point for their own expression. Now, the only thing left is for you guys to use this weekend to hack your very own personality right into your 23 profile…

Over the summer we’ll be adding more standard themes to 23, and we’d love to be inspired from the users. So when you’re done playing with the CSS, post a comment here and direct us to your profile…