This week's update is late on account of travel, spoons, and wanting to get the new payment system set up. It was going to be Tuesday (only one day late) but then I realized the season premiere of LOST was on! I didn't want to miss it, so here we are on Friday afternoon... My apologies for being late, hopefully the content is worth it.

1. Money, money, money!

Money is, of course, important to us. Being able to continue to run the servers, pay the few people who do contracting work for us, and cover our meager salaries is a necessity if we're going to keep Dreamwidth going.

There are a few things to mention about money and payments and our shop. First, we accidentally had the Holiday Promotion active for several weeks past the holidays. Some of you got some extra free time by buying in early/mid January... oh well, hope you enjoy it!

Secondly, as of today's code push we now support Google Checkout for payments. This will allow most of you to be able to purchase accounts again in our Dreamwidth Shop. If you've been holding off on renewing your paid account, or buying paid time for a friend, please feel free to do so now!

A word on using Google Checkout: I know that some of you will find this system difficult to use, or be unable to make payments with it. I'm really sorry for the inconvenience and impracticality of this, and we're aware of your needs. denise is going to spend time this coming week going through the various merchant processors people have suggested to us and looking for ways we can better support our international customers and people without credit cards.

In the meantime, since we still hope you'll want to support Dreamwidth, please take a look at our Check/Money Order options. I know that this is inconvenient and can take some time, but please consider it. Dreamwidth is only able to survive on your support, and every person counts. We're still new and still somewhat in the red from month to month as far as income/expenses go.

Finally, if you aren't able to take advantage of any of these options, you might consider partnering with someone else in your country or somewhere else who you trust and who has access to payment methods that we support. Or contact us! We can't promise to find a perfect solution for you, but we will try our best.

Thank you all in advance for your support. You make this possible. :)

2. Development

This week's code tour was put together by pauamma. He's been away from us for a few months but is now starting to get back into the swing of things, and we're very happy to have him back!

http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/36699.html

Other development progress: we've been working on backend stuff a lot still, converting pages from the old and crusty BML templating engine to the more modern Template Toolkit. This isn't a user-facing change (you don't see it on the site) but it's been happening in the background and it's super exciting for us.

Another development update you will probably be excited to hear is that I've made good progress on the "read your friends page from another site on Dreamwidth" feature. (What should we call that?) I've got it working on my development environment, but it has a lot of presentation issues that need to be fixed before it can go out.

In the next weekly update, I will be asking people to look at the decisions we've made about privacy and implementation for this feature. We want you to give us your feedback before we make the feature available as this is something we really want to get right.

3. Spam Filter Tweaks

Dreamwidth is (as of a month or two ago) using a spam filter on its forwarding service. We noticed that some of the mails that were getting marked as spam weren't actually spam, so we tuned the sensitivity down a bit.

If you are continuing to see forwarded mails getting marked as spam erroneously, please let us know and we can continue to tune this feature. Similarly, if you actually get spam to your Dreamwidth email address that doesn't get caught, it might be useful to know exactly what you got.

You can contact us by emailing support@dreamwidth.org.

4. End

That's it for this week. Pretty short, given I spent all of my time on the Google Checkout code and then 'remote viewing of your friends page' (that feature really needs a name). I'll be back in a few days with more information, questions, and commentary!

Have a good weekend!

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