Entry tags:

weekly announcements

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 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 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 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. 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.

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