Entry tags:

weekly announcements

Hi Dreamwidth,

I just got an oven, so I have been learning how to bake. So far I've made two batches of brownies; next I'll try to figure out bread. Wish more of you were here, so I could share!

This week's update contains:

* Code Tour
* Changes to Renames
* Data Migration, Code Pushes
* NaNo, NaBlo, and Treasure
* Polls

Code Tour

In this week's code tour, we resolved 25 bugs. Special mention to kerravonsen who just had her first submitted theme become official! Also much thanks to cheyinka who had her first themes go live on the site last week.

A lot of the work done this week was to make us siteadmins' lives easier (including some nifty new tools which have me all up in *glee*), but I'd like to point out that two-token username swaps are coming.

Changes to Renames

The two-token username swap is for you who have two journals where you'd like to keep both usernames, but you'd like to swap those usernames around. The old way required three rename tokens and a complicated process of juggling the usernames until they settled on the right journals. The new way requires two rename tokens (because you're renaming two journals), and can be done in one step.

We'll also be tweaking community renames so that in addition to renaming a community, you can also rename to a community. To prevent the name of an active community from being taken (which would turn the community into ex_comm123), the community must have no members other than the administrator doing the renaming.

Data Migration, Code Pushes

We've been aiming for smaller code pushes, done more often, to spread the load and to reduce the incidence of bugs. It seems to be working: the last two code pushes were fairly uneventful. We had some bug reports but the root causes were easy to dig out and fix.

In case I haven't said it recently, by the way, thank you to everyone who comments in dw_maintenance, or submits a support request! If you're ever unsure about reporting a bug you've run into, well the way we see it is that the sooner we know about a problem, the sooner we can fix it :-)


A couple of news posts ago, denise mentioned that we'd needed to do some work for icon keyword renames and that that feature should be available to everyone again soon. We (rather optimistically) thought it would take less than a week back then.

We've rolled out the changes to half the userbase so far. It's taking a while because we have to process all entries and all comments of each user, and the process is made longer because we only run it during non-peak times so that it doesn't slow down the site. (Hopefully you've never even noticed the difference!).

Anyway, if you watch our Twitter and were wondering, that's where all the tweets about migration and temporarily pausing content imports are coming from.

NaNo, NaBlo, and Treasure

All our themes based on NaNo colors can be found under the NNWM style category. (ETA) Some of those styles also have the NaNoWriMo participant badge as part of layout -- cheyinka contacted the NaNo committee and got permission to use it :-)

And as an aside, the Featured category should be updated much more often: at least every code push.

At a suggestion from the comments last news post, we've added a NaBloPoMo feed on our Latest Things page. It contains entries tagged 'nablopomo', 'nablopomo2010', 'nablopomo10', 'nablo10', and 'nablo'.

And this week's Etsy Treasury is now up. The theme is purples and pinks -- have fun!

Polls

The poll results were overwhelmingly clear: Neutral Good (a theme for Practicality) is our new default layout. Thanks everyone who voted and commented! And if you like the look, but are more interested in other colors, check out the Practicality themes.


We're trying to figure out an issue which is causing many poll notifications to be sent for each poll vote, so here have a poll for no reason at all:


And finally, let's wrap things up with a poll with a real reason for being. exor674 is interested in writing an Android client and asks what Android devices Dreamwidth users have access to. If you're interested in an Android client, go vote!


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.