denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
Denise ([staff profile] denise) wrote in [site community profile] dw_news2011-02-25 01:18 pm

Weekly Update: 24 Feb 2011

Hello Dreamwidth! First off: thanks to everyone who gave me a hand with the internet hell problems last time; the escalated executive customer service team did finally get the issues resolved. Secondly, I wish to announce that after, oh, two months of living in this house, we have finally set up the office so it is no longer a bunch of random boxes with a slowly-falling-apart kitchen table being used as a temporary desk. (Now I have my good old folding card table being used as a desk. No, really, it's an improvement, I swear.)

So, I am here to bring you this week's Dreamwidth News, now from my once-more-hooked-up spiffy awesome 28" monitor. Hopefully this will mean less shoulder and neck strain now that I am not hunched over my laptop screen.

A reminder: this week is Dreamwidth open account creation week! From now until 28 February, creating an account won't require an invite code. So, if you have anyone you know who's been unable to find a DW invite, this is the week to create an account! Welcome to everyone who's joined us so far. We hope you'll like your new home.

...I totally would have finished this update yesterday, except I slept through it. Yes, all of yesterday. I don't want to talk about it.

Behind the cut:

* Development
* Suggestions Bug Bounty
* Design Poll
* Location, Location, Location
* Embeds
* Nifty Mood Theme Tool
* Comment Cleaning Redux
* Sad News



Development



You can see the past fortnight's work in our two code tours: Feb 06, 2011 - Feb 17, 2011 and Feb 18, 2011 - Feb 24, 2011. (And welcome to [personal profile] axisofanarchy, with this week's!)

Notable things include:

* Improvements to the Find Users with Similar Interests page: deleted accounts and accounts you're already subscribed to won't show up, and the page will be split by account type (personal accounts/OpenID accounts/community accounts).

* Massive improvements to our outgoing Atom feeds to make them compliant with newer versions of the protocol. (You won't notice this unless you use a feedreader to read Dreamwidth journals, but it was well overdue for an upgrade.)

* Fixing a bug that was preventing the crosspost footer on the Account Settings page from displaying properly. (It still worked, it just didn't show the variables properly.)

* Allowing people to customize the text of the Crossposts: metadata that shows when you've chosen to display where else an entry has been posted.

* Adding a visual indication when you've marked an inbox notification as 'read'.

* Changing the inbox so that when you interact with an item (by hitting 'reply'), it won't open in a new window.

* Expanding the "Custom CSS" text box on the Customize Style page, to give you more room to work in.

* Making it so that when you create a new feed account on Dreamwidth (as opposed to adding a feed account that's already been created), your reading page won't get spammed with every single entry in the feed. (Only the three latest entries from the feed will show on your reading page.)

As always, these improvements won't be live until the next code push. Watch [site community profile] dw_maintenance for details.


Suggestions Bug Bounty



If you check out the code tour, you'll see that many of the past two weeks' development efforts have been from things suggested by you all through our Make a Suggestion page. This is because the second anniversary of Dreamwidth's open beta is coming up at the end of April, and we're looking to give y'all as many presents as possible to celebrate!

From now until the end of March, that means we're placing a development bounty on bugs that were opened from suggestions, during our March Suggestions Hackathon. Anyone is eligible and there are lots of little things to work on, so if you've been thinking about getting into Dreamwidth development work, now's the time!


Design Poll



Recently we've done a bunch of backend work to make it possible for both your "All Icons" page and your Profile page to display in your journal layout. As we start doing the frontend, there are a lot of decisions we need to make, and as always, we want to do it in the way that y'all find most useful. (Or at least "least annoying".)

So, take a second to give your feedback in [site community profile] dw_design: What are the best ways to roll out styled icon/profile pages?


Location, Location, Location



A recent suggestion asked for us to stop linking the "Current Location" metadata on entries to the Google Maps for that location. (To be precise, it asked for an option -- which we are very reluctant to do except for critically important things, which I don't think this qualifies as.) I honestly don't care either way, and the suggestion seemed to be fairly popular, but before we make the change, I figured I'd toss it to a wider audience: does anyone use or rely upon that linking and would seriously miss it if it disappeared?


Embedding Stuff



A recent code push made it possible for us to define "safe embedding sites" -- sites for which the <embed> tag will work and not be cleaned out. We need to specifically whitelist these sites because the embed tag has the potential to introduce Very Nasty Stuff, risking the security of your journal and the journals of anyone who views your journal.

So, we thought we'd poll you for 'safe' embedding sites that you'd want to use. Obviously, YouTube is on the top of the list, and people have also requested Vimeo, but what else should be allowed?


Nifty Mood Theme Tool



Have you wanted to take advantage of the paid account benefit of creating your own mood theme but been stymied by the ... less-than-usable mood theme editor? (Believe me, fixing it up is On Our List.) Check out the mood theme sharing tool created by one of our users -- it might ease the pain.


Comment Cleaning, Redux



Last update, I discussed some changes to the HTML/CSS allowed in comments, being made to strip out a whole bunch of annoyance exploits being used to break pages and cause grief by spammers and people with too much time on their hands. After some discussion in the comments, and since the majority of the people who are using these techniques are anonymous commenters, we've decided to make the changes only apply to anonymous commenting for now. We may need to re-visit this decision if it becomes more of an issue in the future, but for now you shouldn't notice any changes.


Sad News



This week, we are saddened to announce that we've lost a member of the Dreamwidth family. [personal profile] hippyjolteon passed away suddenly. We are made less by the loss.

*

That's it from 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. If I don't sleep through it again.
azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)

[personal profile] azurelunatic 2011-02-25 06:31 pm (UTC)(link)
I like the Google Maps linking feature, but I don't rely on it; I think the site as a whole might be better served by figuring out how to allow Google Maps embeds in the entry proper, and ditching the location-linking.

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[personal profile] treewishes - 2011-03-03 14:05 (UTC) - Expand
stormy: βͺ ππŽπ“πˆπ‚π„ ❫ 𝑫𝑢 𝑡𝑢𝑻 𝑻𝑨𝑲𝑬 𝑴𝒀 𝑰π‘ͺ𝑢𝑡𝑺 ⊘ (Default)

[personal profile] stormy 2011-02-25 06:34 pm (UTC)(link)
I wonder how feasible or safe it'd be to allow embedding of Plurk or Twitter, or another social media microblogging format. There are times when I'd love to make Dreamwidth a hub of all social media, and other times where I go "That's completely unrealistic!"

Still, food for thought.

I don't care too much about the Current Location changes either way. The only changes I'm watching with a weary eye are the profile and icon page customization changes. Those actually kind of scare me. You can do some pretty crazy things with customization that could break the crap out of those pages. It might sound weird, but I like seeing Dreamwidth on the site somewhere. I'm not sure about what sort of level of customization we're talking about, but I'll probably cling to the site scheme on those pages. Otherwise, I don't go to www.dreamwidth.org much (It doesn't have a lot of functionality for me..), and everything else is my own journal or my circle.
foxfirefey: A fox colored like flame over an ornately framed globe (Default)

[personal profile] foxfirefey 2011-02-25 06:55 pm (UTC)(link)
You're right about users being able to break their profile/icon pages in their own styles if that's what they had the mind to do!

You, the viewer, will always be able to look at them in the site scheme, though. We just need to figure out the best way to accomplish that.

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silkmoth101: (Pendragon)

[personal profile] silkmoth101 2011-02-25 06:35 pm (UTC)(link)
Hi! I got notice from you that my paid account, that a friend of mine gifted me with, will expire in two weeks. Now my problem... I live in Europe, I have no credit card. So I wanted to know if there is any chance that you go back to paying with PayPal?
novalis: (Default)

[personal profile] novalis 2011-02-25 06:35 pm (UTC)(link)
DW didn't drop PayPal; PayPal dropped DW. So your question would better be addressed to PayPal.

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fizzyblogic: [Game of Thrones] detail on a map of Westeros (*hearts*)

[personal profile] fizzyblogic 2011-02-25 06:35 pm (UTC)(link)
I embed from blip.tv whenever I post a vid, so I propose that for the embedding whitelist!

[personal profile] feathertail 2011-02-25 08:54 pm (UTC)(link)
Seconded, because my mate is hoping to start posting stuff there.

ISP issues, PayPal and Computer Tables

[personal profile] babysprite 2011-02-25 06:49 pm (UTC)(link)
  1. I'm so happy to read those issues have been resolved. While my current ISP has been pretty good to me, I have a general distrust of Internet Service Providers.
  2. I don't know what PayPal has going on and why they are giving any attention to the pseudo-religious delusionals who want to censor everything not in lock-step with their twisted (non)sensibilities.
  3. FYI: I found a great folding computer table at Amazon.com
/\__/\
(='.'=)
(")_(")
Happy Friday!
Edited 2011-02-25 18:50 (UTC)
ursamajor: people on the beach watching the ocean (Default)

[personal profile] ursamajor 2011-02-25 07:06 pm (UTC)(link)
I saw somebody on my droll using Dotsub earlier this week, so maybe that would be a useful one to whitelist as well? It appears to be useful for subtitling videos and allowing for multiple translations of those subtitles, but I have to admit I don't know a lot about it - I'm getting an accessibility "vibe" but not sure how true that proves to be in practice.

Oh, right, and Flickr! Seeing as I just embedded a video from there earlier this week ...

As for the location thing, I am mongoose - I think most of my friends who do use it use it in ways that Google can't translate into an actual set of coordinates, so I wouldn't mind the link going away, though sometimes it's amusing to click and see where Google thinks "running late" is, f'rex.

And the not-being-spammed-by-brand-new-feed thing sounds excellent :)
Edited (forgot flickr) 2011-02-25 19:10 (UTC)
azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)

[personal profile] azurelunatic 2011-02-26 12:25 am (UTC)(link)
I use the zip code at some points.
ktalk: (Default)

Embedding Flickr in Dreamwidth.

[personal profile] ktalk 2011-02-25 07:09 pm (UTC)(link)
Could the Dreamwidth team please allow Flickr videos to be embedded? It already allows their still photos but not motion pictures.

Besides, what security implications are there with the tag when other blogging sites such as Tumblr are happy to accept them?

[personal profile] gone_fishing 2011-02-25 07:16 pm (UTC)(link)
Only the three latest entries from the feed will show on your reading page.

+1,000,000. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THAAAANK YOU. I've wanted to create some feeds and have been terrified that my reading list is going to be borked up with epic amounts of posts. \o/

Also re: the Google Maps linking feature... I actually dislike that linking, as most of the people I know put something like "the office" or "my dungeon" or whatever for Current Location, as would I, but it comes with that weird little link that doesn't go anywhere unless you put in an actual physical location, which most people don't do as far as I've seen. So yeah, I'd like to see the Google Maps link disappear if possible. It's not something I'm vehement about, but it would be nice. :3
matgb: Artwork of 19th century upper class anarchist, text: MatGB (Default)

[personal profile] matgb 2011-02-25 08:46 pm (UTC)(link)
I've wanted to create some feeds and have been terrified that my reading list is going to be borked up with epic amounts of posts

Heh, what I do is create the feed, but leave the tab open, and subscribe to all the new feeds at the end of my browsing session.

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facetofcathy: four equal blocks of purple and orange shades with a rusty orange block centred on top (Default)

[personal profile] facetofcathy 2011-02-25 07:19 pm (UTC)(link)
Embedding whitelist suggestions:

Very much yes, please to Vimeo.

The National Film Board of Canada, so I can go on inflicting Canadian culture on my reading list.

Current TV, soon to be home to Keith Olbermann, current alternate site to most Jay Smooth videos.

Viddler, cuz there's vids there.

Comedy Central, because I believe people deserve to be able to embed those Daily Show clips that I can't watch without spending half an hour hunting them down on The Comedy Network (which doesn't seem to support embedding that I can see.)

And, much as it pains me, see above bitterness, Hulu.
facetofcathy: four equal blocks of purple and orange shades with a rusty orange block centred on top (Default)

[personal profile] facetofcathy 2011-02-25 07:26 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, and Dailymotion for music mostly.

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queenbarwench: (aurora blue)

[personal profile] queenbarwench 2011-02-25 07:19 pm (UTC)(link)
Google Picassa images are a good whitelist candidate.

And I could care less about the 'current location' thing. I've never once used it to post my real location, and Google Maps can't find 'Home, desk' on any map :) (if it can, where is it?)
holyschist: Image of a medieval crocodile from Herodotus, eating a person, with the caption "om nom nom" (Default)

[personal profile] holyschist 2011-02-25 07:43 pm (UTC)(link)
Embedding stuff. I'm not 100% sure any of these sites use that particular code, but possibly

Flickr
GoogleMaps
GoogleCalendar

I'd like the GoogleMaps link to go away; I'm in the group of people who finds it annoying to have "my office" or "hanging above a shark tank" be a GM link.
mokie: Ghostbusters' Vinz Clortho wears a collander and answers questions (nerdy)

[personal profile] mokie 2011-02-25 08:06 pm (UTC)(link)
I knew that was you I saw over the shark tank last week! I was the one strapped down to the table with the giant laser aimed at me.

Wow, small world.

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chagrined: Marvel comics: zombie!Spider-Man, holding playing cards, saying "Brains?" (brains?)

[personal profile] chagrined 2011-02-25 07:59 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh hooray, so excited to hear this about the comment cleaning redux! I was sad to see the changes in the previous news post because a lot of them were things I use in comments. So this brings me much joy. ♥

Ooooh, curious, will whitelisting certain sites for the embed tag allow videos from those sites to be embedded in comments as well too? I know that no video embedding works in comments atm still, right? *crosses fingers and hopes* :D :D

Thanks for the post and have a good weekend!
phoenixsong: An orange bird with red, orange and yellow wings outstretched, in front of a red heart. (techchick)

[personal profile] phoenixsong 2011-02-25 08:19 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm OK with making the GMaps linking optional, or making the location field itself optional. I use it; sometimes with a real location, sometimes not. I totally understand people who don't use it not wanting to be bothered by it. I just wouldn't want to see it completely eliminated, for those of us who don't mind it.
cesy: "Cesy" - An old-fashioned quill and ink (Default)

[personal profile] cesy 2011-02-26 07:45 am (UTC)(link)
The location field already is optional, isn't it?

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digitalsidhe: (Default)

[personal profile] digitalsidhe 2011-02-25 08:21 pm (UTC)(link)
I actually don't bother to use the Location feature at all, specifically because of the auto-link. I'd want to put in things like, "at work", "at home", or whatever else, and those wind up being totally useless map links.

What I'd really is the ability to set up a few standard locations in my profile, where I'd have the text "work" but have the Google Maps link show the actual location of my workplace. I doubt that would be popular enough to justify the amount of development effort it'd take, though.

If there were no more auto-linking, I might start using the Location field.
sarken: leaves of mint against a worn wall (Default)

[personal profile] sarken 2011-02-25 09:19 pm (UTC)(link)
Ditto on not using it because of the auto-link. In fact, I usually just display: none the entire field with CSS, so that way I don't accidentally tap the link when I'm using my iPhone.

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pauamma: Cartooney crab wearing hot pink and acid green facemask holding drink with straw (Default)

[personal profile] pauamma 2011-02-25 08:28 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't think I ever used the currents in any of my entries. I don't think I pay much attention to what others put therte, let alone what it may link to.
helens78: Cartoon. An orange cat sits on the chest of a woman with short hair and glasses. (Default)

[personal profile] helens78 2011-02-25 09:37 pm (UTC)(link)
This!

I was going to say "I wouldn't mind if the GMaps link went away", but realized I'm just not a typical user of that feature, since I... never use it! So take that with a grain of salt. :)

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sky: (ph - sharon)

Embedding

[personal profile] sky 2011-02-25 08:46 pm (UTC)(link)
I would love to be able to embed two particular things: widgets from Plurk, and videos from Nico Nico Douga (Japan's Youtube, basically). I don't know if it's anything like embedding videos from Youtube, but their embed code looks like this, for example:

< script type="text/javascript" src="http://ext.nicovideo.jp/thumb_watch/sm4457573" >< /script >< noscript >< a href="http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm4457573" >γ€γƒ‹γ‚³γƒ‹γ‚³ε‹•η”»γ€‘γ€ζ†‚θΎ›γ€‘γ€Œγ‚΅γƒ³γƒ‰γƒͺヨン(Cendrillon)γ€γ΅γŸγ‚Šγ§ζ­Œγ£γ¦γΏγŸγ€γ†γ•γƒˆγ‚₯ラむ】(link to the video; the Japanese text is the title)< /a >< /noscript >

(with spaces removed, of course)
matgb: Artwork of 19th century upper class anarchist, text: MatGB (Default)

Embedding

[personal profile] matgb 2011-02-25 08:49 pm (UTC)(link)
How about this as an off the wall suggestion for embedding--LJ polls in an iframe with a noscheme display so you just get the poll.

Been meaning to suggest it for ages, but I've a few friends who post their polls there not here, and some way of them also showing here would work well for me. It'd also help for when you crosspost a community poll to a personal journal post, etc.
marahmarie: (M In M Forever) (Default)

Re: Embedding

[personal profile] marahmarie 2011-02-26 10:16 pm (UTC)(link)
It's the iframe that's the problem. You can hide anything behind an iframe - like malicious code - it's like a wall that you can't see through to know what's on the other side.

Re: Embedding

[personal profile] matgb - 2011-02-26 22:24 (UTC) - Expand
ninetydegrees: Art: self-portrait (Default)

Embedding Stuff

[personal profile] ninetydegrees 2011-02-25 09:23 pm (UTC)(link)
Soundcloud, please?

Edit: oh wait, it already works.
Edited 2011-02-25 21:26 (UTC)
ein_myria: (Default)

Re: Embedding Stuff

[personal profile] ein_myria 2011-02-26 12:00 am (UTC)(link)
Dittoing this. I think there might be some issues with the object embed though, it's not showing the full player at all. (blogspot does this beautifully)

Re: Embedding Stuff

[personal profile] ninetydegrees - 2011-02-26 00:05 (UTC) - Expand

[personal profile] zaluzianskya 2011-02-25 10:50 pm (UTC)(link)
I am so torn on the idea of displaying profile pages and icon pages in journal styles. On the one hand, it would look nice and it would solve the problem of coding that works just fine in entries (even site-schemed entries!) breaking when I try to put it on a profile. On the other hand... :|a
silverflight8: Barcode with silverflight8 on top and userid underneath (Barcode)

[personal profile] silverflight8 2011-02-26 03:20 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah, I'm iffy on the profile thing, too. I like the profile/icon pages as standardized pages because then there isn't some neon-green-flashing-background, and I can find what I want to find easily and quickly.

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ochibashigure: (Default)

[personal profile] ochibashigure 2011-02-25 10:57 pm (UTC)(link)
I dunno, if you look at my posts I use the location thingy on google maps on my entries with almost every single one. I move a LOT due to my husband's line of work, so I find the feature very very useful and important to how I use the site. I'm sure I can get along without it... but it sucks to have something I'm used to using and enjoy taken away.

I'd like to see maybe an option in the user settings to allow the location to display as a link or as plaintext like "mood" and "music" fields are displayed.

[personal profile] hotel_paranoia 2011-02-26 12:05 am (UTC)(link)
Making it so that when you create a new feed account on Dreamwidth (as opposed to adding a feed account that's already been created), your reading page won't get spammed with every single entry in the feed.

WOO-HOO. So glad to see this, I make comic feeds a lot. :)
timeasmymeasure: kerry washington with a rose held right below her lips (stock: going along)

[personal profile] timeasmymeasure 2011-02-26 12:52 am (UTC)(link)
Hulu, Vimeo, and Dailymotion :)
silverhare: drawing of a grey hare (avatar - katara [stretch towards sun&sea)

[personal profile] silverhare 2011-02-26 01:00 am (UTC)(link)
Thank you for honouring my friend. ♥ I really appreciate it.
rosefyre: Me (Default)

[personal profile] rosefyre 2011-02-26 04:30 am (UTC)(link)
Embedding - I'd like to request three sites, as the group of friends I belong to utilizes all three.

They are:
http://www.slideshare.net/
http://www.scribd.com/
http://www.authorstream.com/

Thanks!
rhoboat: Coffee (Default)

[personal profile] rhoboat 2011-02-26 04:45 am (UTC)(link)
What if you embed videos from a personal website? Would each person doing that have to request that their sites get whitelisted?

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