Entry tags:

weekly announcements

It's a lazy Monday evening over at DW World Headquarters (aka my living room), where zarhooie, one of our support coordinators, is visiting for a few days. We have all of our yarn piled out on the floor to show it off and re-catalog it (and, okay, lie on it like a dragon on top of the hoard), a Stargate SG-1 DVD marathon going on the TV, and an ice cream cake from Cold Stone waiting to be dessert. In other words, life is good, and it is time for the weekly Dreamwidth update!

1. Development

We resolved 41 bugs this week, 34 of which were resolved/fixed. (The rest of them were duplicates, invalid, or otherwise not something that needed programmer action.) You can view our week's development efforts in this week's Code Tour, which is something I've been trying to do on a weekly basis; it's great to review all the things that we accomplished in a given week and get a chance to explain to anybody who's interested.

As always, if you want to follow along with development, there's changelog for the nitty-gritty, changelog_digest for the summaries, and the_dw_herald for the high points.

This week's development heroes are afuna, with 9 patches (as well as review + commit duty), kareila with 9 patches (as well as review + commit duty), and yvi, who's been rocking the code-review queue. (As part of our quality control process, every patch is reviewed by at least one other programmer before it's committed to the site.) All told, we had patches contributed by 9 separate contributors this week -- all of whom we appreciate immensely!

Meanwhile, if you've been thinking about getting started in DW development, you could see your own name in the next weekly update -- even if you don't have any previous coding experience. Check out our Dreamhack service, as well as our Getting Started guides on the Dreamwidth Wiki. We have guides on getting started in Development and the Dreamhack service. We'd love to see you give things a try! If you get stuck, you can come join dw_dev_training for suggestions, guidance, and tutorials, or come visit us in irc at irc.dwscoalition.org, port 6667, channel #dw_kindergarten.

2. Moving House

Now that we have a few months of experience with our traffic levels and server needs, we've decided that it's time to plan for the long haul. In order to keep the site stable, fast, and generally awesome, we're in the process of moving away from a shared hosting service to fully dedicated hardware -- still renting, but we'll be the only customers on those machines, instead of our existing shared setup.

Slicehost has been pretty good to us up until now, but we're ready for our own space (it's like when you finally get to move out of your parents' basement into your very own apartment). We'll be moving to Server Beach, where at least a few of the geeks have DW accounts of their very own -- which means that they'll take really good care of us.

We've been working on the backend parts of that all week -- okay, mark and matthew have been working on the backend parts of this all week -- and later on this weekend or next week, there'll be some brief downtime in order for us to make the complete switch.

It should be pretty painless (for you guys; we might be tearing our hair out a bit), but keep an eye on dw_maintenance for the details on when we schedule the downtime.

3. Invite Codes

This afternoon, we distributed a whole bunch of invite codes -- this time, for people who didn't have any available. As always, you don't need to use them all at once, and you don't need to save the email that you got with the codes. The Invite Someone page, available in the header of all the available site schemes, will always list your available invite codes. (And, if you're out of codes, you'll see a link to request more.)

If you're ever in need of more invite codes in bulk -- for a group project, a roleplaying game, or just to move a large group of your friends -- you can open a support request in the Account Payments category and let us know -- we'll see what we can do.

4. Styles

As mark announced last week, we released five new styles, designed by branchandroot, with our last code push. We're happy to announce that with our next code push (which should be sometime in the next week or two), we'll have even more styles available, thanks to the tireless work of afuna, av8rmike, the rest of the styles team, and all of the people who have been creating designs and making them available.

The new styles we'll have will be both new Tabula Rasa designs, and new color palettes for the existing system styles. If you've come up with an awesome color combination for your journal using Negatives, Transmogrified, or Drifting, we'd love to add it as an option. See dreamscapes for how to submit it for consideration as one of the system-available styles.

5. Suggestions

One of the awesome things I like most about how Dreamwidth is how mark and I aren't the only voices shaping the way the site is turning out. We've got a really strong vision for what the site is and should be, but we also know that we're not going to think of everything, and that people who are using the site are the ones who know what the site needs. (Of course, we're using the site ourselves, but there's still the risk of tunnel vision.)

Fortunately, we have a great resource in helping us figure out what we should do: dw_suggestions and the Suggestions Generator. We've been gathering (and discussing) your suggestions for a few weeks, and this week, we did a major migration of suggestions from dw_suggestions to our Bugzilla installation (where at least a few of them have already been implemented, and yvi is working on one of the bigger ones).

If you're interested in helping to shape Dreamwidth's development, there are a few ways you can get involved. You can make a suggestion if there's something you can think of that might make things better, or read and review the existing suggestions, discuss their merits, and vote on whether or not you think they'd be a good fit for Dreamwidth. The votes and discussions aren't the only thing we use when we decide whether or not to migrate the suggestion from the community to our bug tracking database, but we rely heavily on them, so don't be shy: let us know what you're thinking.

6. The Business Stuff

As mark announced last week, beginning in October, he'll be working for Dreamwidth full-time. (Neither of us can wait -- the amount of development we'll be able to get done with Mark on the project full-time is going to be great, and Mark's looking forward to being able to work from home in his boxers.) We also provided a link to our latest business update, in which we mention that our current income situation is very nearly at break-even, although slightly in the red. (Don't worry -- we totally planned for that, for the first few months at least; the Seed Account sale we held at open beta launch was intended to cover our shortfalls for the first year of the site.)

With our move to our new hosting setup, we'll actually be lowering our montly costs, but the savings will be correspondingly eaten up by what we're going to be paying me and mark for our labor. (We're not talking about rolling-in-dough here, either.) If you've been thinking about buying some Dreamwidth paid time, for you or for a friend, you can do so in the Dreamwidth Shop. Likewise, our last code push introduced the ability to purchase paid time for a random active user, which is a great way to make a payment to the site if none of your friends need paid time. (And, as we've previously mentioned, if you don't want to be eligible to receive random paid time, you can opt out under the Privacy tab of the Account Settings page.)

Our goal is to take in about $8,000-$10,000 a month, which will cover our server rental, our contractor payments, and a very modest salary to both me and mark. If there are any suggestions you have for how to make paid accounts more appealing, we'd love to hear them through the Suggestions generator, and if there are any questions you have about our business setup, you can ask them in the dw_biz Q&A post.

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I'm sure that the minute I post this, I'll think of five billion things I forgot to mention, but that's all I can think of right now! As always, if you're having problems with Dreamwidth, Support can help you; for notices of site problems and downtime, check the Twitter status page; if you just want to come and hang out with us, join us in irc at irc.dwscoalition.org, channel #dw. We'll see you next week for our next update.