Entry tags:

weekly announcements

Hello, Dreamwidth! This week I bring you personal news: my wife and I are buying a house. (It's a pretty awesome house.) This is going to mean a change in the address where you send check/money order payments and other DW-related mail, but I will update you all when that actually happens! (We need to figure out which post office is the most convenient, for PO box obtaining.)

In the meantime, here's this week's update on the news that isn't about my life. Behind the cut we have:

* Development
* V-Gifts
* Code Push
* Styles stuff
* Styles poll
* Accessibility needs survey
* NaNoWriMo
* DW Community

Development

This week we resolved 18 bugs. They were mostly styles-related -- both display fixes and new themes -- with an assortment of bugfixes from last week's code push. Welcome this week goes to new theme contributor musyc! This week's code tour was done by bookofjude, who didn't duck fast enough in irc when I was looking for someone to do it. (It's his first, too.)

There was one huuuuuuge thing committed this week, though, which leads me to:

V-Gifts

This week, after six months of hard work, kareila's patch for the v-gifts backend was finally committed. This means that we're very close to having v-gifts available for you to purchase and send to your friends! For those who don't know, v-gifts are small images you can buy and customize with your own message. They'll then be delivered to your recipient, who will have the choice to accept or reject the gift.

We patterned our v-gift implementation on LiveJournal's, but it's entirely new code -- since LJ's version of it isn't open source -- and so there are a few changes. First of all, the recipient will be able to choose whether or not to accept and display the vgift -- they won't automatically be delivered. (You'll also be able to set your preferences to refuse all v-gifts by default, if you'd like.) There's also something I find really interesting: the ability for you all to make your own v-gifts. You'll be able to send those custom v-gifts to your friends, and you'll also be able to mark them as "for site-wide use" -- an admin will look over them and make sure they're okay and that you've given us permission to use the images (and that the images are your own), and then make them available for purchase and use by everyone. I'm really excited about that part of it!

It will still be a little while until we have the frontend -- aka the parts y'all see -- finished, since we want to really hammer on the backend and make sure it's rock-solid first. But this means that we're on the lookout for more v-gift art! If you have something you want to submit as a potential site-wide v-gift, we want to see it.

If you'd like to contribute a vgift for consideration, it should come in two versions: one that's roughly userpic-sized (100x100 maximum) and one that's larger-sized (300x300 maximum). Artwork should be submitted in PNG format or as a vector graphic and should be done on a transparent background. We'll ask you to sign and send in a Contributor Licensing Agreement: you will retain the rights to your work, but this document gives us a licence to use and redistribute your work as part of the Dreamwidth project. You must be able to certify that you own the rights to the image you send in -- in other words, you can't use someone else's artwork as part of yours unless it's in the public domain or the creator has explicitly signed over the rights to the work to you.

If you have something that suits, send it to denise @ dreamwidth.org!

Code Push

In keeping with our desire to do more frequent code pushes, we will be doing one tomorrow! The goal is for it to occur around 1200 PHT / 0400 UTC / 2200 PDT, but it all depends on when fu has time in her morning. (We wouldn't want her to do a code push improperly caffeinated!)

This code push will include all the fixes in the above code tour. (Some of them are already live, since they were emergency fixes for last week's code push.) It will involve a brief downtime while we update.

As always, keep an eye on dw_maintenance and our offsite Twitter status page for details on when things will be starting.

Styles stuff

If you've been getting an error while previewing entries since last week's code push, you can fix it by recompiling your layout layer. Detailed instructions in dw_styles.

Meanwhile, if you've been looking for a new style, but browsing through the style browser isn't doing it for you, check out the unofficial prototype style browser that foxfirefey made, and leave feedback for her there. We'd like to bring it on-site and make it official once we've gotten some feedback from you guys!

Styles poll

Speaking of styles, a few weeks ago we ran a poll for the new default style for newly-created accounts. New layout Practicality won for the layout to be used as default, and this week we're running a followup poll to see which theme should get that honor!

The winner of this poll will be used for the default for newly-created accounts for around the next 3-6 months. It will not change any existing accounts -- even if you haven't changed your layout from the default at the time of your account creation, it won't change your journal layout. This will just be used for newly-created accounts.

Pick which theme you like best:



(And, a reminder: if you have a layout or a color theme for an existing layout that you'd like to submit as a site theme, you can do that in dreamscapes!)

Accessibility Needs Survey

I'm giving a talk at this year's Linux Conf Australia on web accessibility best practices, and as part of that I'd like to gather as much data as possible. If you have accessibility needs, please take a minute and fill out this accessibility survey in dw_accessibility -- it's pretty quick, and the more data I have, the more I can get open-source web developers thinking about helpful accessibility work!

NaNoWriMo

It's that time of the year ... November, when everyone starts frantically typing at the stroke of midnight on November 1. Yes, it's National Novel Writing Month ... again. (I swear it was just yesterday.)

Check out the NaNo forums for our offer for users who are new to Dreamwidth! We're still pondering what we can do for our existing users who win NaNo this year. For support on this crazy journey, there's the nano_writers community. And, this year any post tagged 'nano', 'nanowrimo', 'writing: nanowrimo", "nanowrimo2010", "nanowrimo10", "nano10", or "nnwm10" will appear on the nanowrimo tag feed of the Latest Things.

If you want to show off your NaNoWriMo pride, after tomorrow's code push there will be several NaNo themes, both using the NaNo colors and the NaNo participant badge. Look for the themes titled "NNWM".

Good luck to all of our DW NaNovelists! (...I still haven't decided what I'm writing this year.)

DW Community

* Check out this week's Etsy treasury of DW users' crafts!

* The Dreamwidth Flickr pool is going strong. My favorite photo this week is this leopard portrait -- so gorgeous! If you're on Flickr, why not add some photos of your own?

* old_man_of_hoy is creating a master list of community master lists, so if you've got a list of communities for your hobby/interest/fandom/etc, drop a link there. (Or browse around and see if there's anything nifty!)

* And speaking of communities, don't forget about dw_community_promo, for promoting your communities, as well as the unofficial create_my_comm for when you've got a great idea for a community but you don't want to be the admin yourself.

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That's it for us for another week! 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've got an idea to make the site better, you can make a suggestion.

We'll see you next week for our next update. In which I will probably freak out about the fact that somebody out there thinks that I'm enough of a grownup to be allowed to buy a house.