Entry tags:

weekly announcements

Very very quick update this week, since we are closing on our house in ohmygod three days. (I've been keeping the paper bag for breathing into at hand!)

Behind the cut:

* Development
* December Paid-Time Promotion
* Construction Warning
* Code Pushed
* New Themes
* Community Awesomeness

Development

This week's code tour, done by foxfirefey, contains a bunch of code cleanup and backend fixes, plus the codemerge of two patches from LiveJournal: "filter journals/communities to posts by a specific user" and "show entries that are tagged with both of two tags". Thanks to LJ for the new features!

These changes won't be active on Dreamwidth itself until our next code push, which (in keeping with our recent schedule) will probably be next weekend. We'll announce it here and in dw_maintenance when we schedule it.

December Paid-Time Promotion

After last week's discussion and poll, we've decided that this year's December promotion will be the "10% points bonus" variety: all orders placed in the month of December will receive a 10% points bonus. This is our way of saying "thank you" to all y'all for supporting us and helping to keep us "on the air", so to speak!

Right now it looks like we'll be closing out the year with a shortfall. This isn't as critical as it seems -- we built our five-year plan expecting to take a while until we got to true profitability, and we're still well within the margins that plan called for. But still: If you have the cash to spare, please consider supporting us. We are 100% user-financed: we accept zero advertising and sponsorship, so your payments are the only thing that keep us running. Our goals for 2011 include increasing our server capacity, sending more of our volunteer developers to conferences and training, and hiring some of our developers to work on DW full-time for short contract periods to work on specific projects. All of that takes money!

You can buy DW points and services at the Dreamwidth Shop, and there's always the Circle Gifts and Random Gift option if your own account is paid already. Every payment helps.

Construction Warning

As part of our long-term goal to clean up the site's display and make it easier to maintain and extend in the future, we're starting a project this week to clean up all of the site's HTML and CSS structure. This includes standardizing CSS classes, removing tables that are used entirely for layout, and changing around bits of the site layout to be consistent across all pages.

Obviously we'll be testing the heck out of stuff before we commit the changes and push them live on the site, but there's always a chance we'll miss something! We'll be sure to warn you at the time of the code push that contains the changes, but this is a heads-up that there might be some weirdnesses over the next month or two. We'll let you know where to report them once we really get going.

Code Pushed

Sunday's code push went swimmingly (zero reported issues -- I think that's the first time that's ever happened; it made us really nervous!) and the things contained in the following two code tours are now live on the site:

2010-10-29 to 2010-11-04
2010-11-04 to 2010-11-10

Changes of interest that are now live on the site:

* You can swap the contents of two usernames easily, with only two rename tokens, instead of having to do a complicated and messy dodge with three tokens and a shell-game switch around of usernames.

* It is no longer possible to log into memorial accounts or post or delete entries from them. This will protect those accounts in case anyone tries to break into them to vandalize them.

* Bugfix: a problem with the way email addresses were displayed on the profile was fixed, so your profile should no longer display "(error in linkification)".

* Bugfix: the comment displayed when you're replying to a comment in the site layout has been fixed so it no longer always displays the commenter's default icon, even when a different icon has been chosen for the comment.

* Thanks to heroic work by ninetydegrees, all of our site themes and layouts now use the same, standardized font customization options.

* Bugfix: due to a bug in our changes to allow icon keyword renames to be re-enabled, you couldn't select your default icon when editing an entry. This is now fixed.

New Themes

With the code push, there are a bunch of new themes available for your journal:

* 5 themes by rising for Refried Tablet

* Black Eye II theme by dancing_serpent for Refried Tablet

* 5 new themes by asenathwaite, kerravonsen and rising for Transmogrified

* 4 new themes by dancing_serpent and rising for Tranquility III.

As always, if you have a theme or layout you'd like to submit for a system style, or if you want to help with converting submitted themes into system styles, check out dreamscapes.

Community Awesomeness

* This week's Etsy treasury contains the usual roundup of awesomeness from DW users who are crafters. I never fail to be impressed by how talented our users are. (As always, if you've got an Etsy shop, or a shop elsewhere on the 'net, leave me a comment so I can include you in a future treasury.)

* This week's non-Etsy featured crafter is Gumtree Jewelry.

* This week's Flickr featured photo is this adorable cat pic by Avalon on the Rideau. So cute! The Dreamwidth Flickr pool is awaiting your contributions.

* For Ravelry users, the project of the week is Voske's Skwoyls mittens -- the stranded colorwork is astonishing. Dreamwidth Knitters group is open to all.


*

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, which I've asked fu to do since it will be US Thanksgiving and sarah and I will be traveling. (And we will also be homeowners. Where's my paper bag?) If you're in the US, or celebrate US Thanksgiving, I hope it's a good one for you!

Meanwhile, has anyone seen my pile of cardboard boxes?

For one, a home of your own. That's *awesome.

	My partner and I wish you both success beyond your wildest
	dreams in all ways and all things.

For two, keeping us posted. Thank you.

	We are tech savvy people and apprectiate the transparency
	in the way you keep us informed.

Have a fab-BOO-lous holiday week, next week.

Both of us estranged from our respective families, we had a
"Friendsgiving" with our best friends and it was *wonderful.*

/\__/\
(='.'=)
(")_(")