Entry tags:

weekly announcements

Hullo, Dreamwidth! It's been a slow few weeks, and I haven't had much to update you on, but three weeks is a bit long to go without one of these news updates, so you'll get at least a brief walkthrough of what's going on in DW-ville. I even promise not to wax enthusiastic about our new kitten. (Who is TOTALLY ADORABLE OMG.)

it's also time to officially admit that I've been really lax on getting these updates out every week, and officially bow to necessity and say that from here on out these updates will be biweekly unless something really awesome is going on.

Behind the cut:

* Development
* Open Source Survey
* Help Japan
* Open Account Creation Results
* Paid Accounts
* Three Weeks for Dreamwidth

Development

As usual, we have our code tours:

* 25 Feb - 9 Mar by ursamajor
* 10 Mar - 16 Mar by azurelunatic

This bunch was mostly backend stuff that you'll never notice, but a few user-facing highlights include:

* Improvements to the poll creator: before, adding a question would bring you back to the top of the page when the page refreshed, but now it will bring you directly to the question you just added.

* Adding Twitter as an option for the <user name> tag: once this goes live, you'll be able to do <user name=dreamwidth site=twitter.com> and have it come up as a proper link to that username's Twitter account.

* Including your recipient's displayed name and default icon in addition to their username when you buy a gift for someone in the DW Shop, to make it more certain you've got the right account.

* Fixing a problem in which deleting a crossposted entry on DW's side didn't also delete the entry on the remote (crossposted-to) site.

* Improvements to our RSS parser, so that syndicated feed accounts will recognize authorship (who wrote the post) in more cases.

* The return of the link to gift a random unknown user in the Shop, which was accidentally removed in another bug earlier this year.

* Duplicating the "refresh" link to the bottom of the Inbox when there are more than 10 items being displayed, to prevent having to scroll back up to the top.

* Fixing the pluralization of "hour/hours" in layouts when hovering over the date/time of comments.

* Fixing up the Inbox so that comments that have been edited don't display the full (identical) text of the comment on subsequent notifications, just a notification that the comment has been edited.

As always, these fixes are not yet live, and won't be live until the next code push. We'll announce the code push in dw_maintenance when we're ready to do it!

This week we also welcome back wyntarvox from a DW dev hiatus. Good to have you back, Wyn! We missed you.

Open Source Survey

The Ada Initiative, a new project devoted to improving the representation of women in open source and a project which I am on the advisory board of, has started a survey of women in open technology and culture. If you participate in any project devoted to open technology and culture -- open source, free software, open hardware, open government, open data, open standards and formats, transformative works community, Wikipedia and other open-information projects, etc -- take a few minutes and fill out the survey!

Help Japan

Our hearts and thoughts are with the people of Japan as they start the long process of recovery from the devastating earthquake experienced earlier this week. The Dreamwidth community help_japan has formed to auction off various things from craftwork to fan works to services and more, to fundraise for the disaster relief efforts. This round of fundraising ends 20 March, so take a look and see if there's anything you'd like to bid on!

If you're looking to donate directly, help_japan has a list of charities doing work in the area. Our household's charity of choice in situations such as these is Doctors Without Borders, who do amazing work.

Open Account Creation Results

Last month we tried an experiement of opening account creation for a week -- allowing people to create accounts without needing invite codes. We had a fairly strong uptick in account creation -- you can see it in the raw stats, under "newbyday" -- and, thankfully, haven't noticed any real corresponding uptick in accounts created for spam purposes. (Okay, we had one, which is a pretty significant thing when it's our very first reported spam account, as opposed to spam from anonymous users or OpenID users. But still.)

So, it's pretty safe to say that the experiment was a success, and we will be likely to repeat it in the future! I don't want to schedule it regularly, because spammers will quickly learn that they should try to hit us on that particular week, but we will absolutely be doing it again.

In the meantime, if you're looking to create a Dreamwidth account, dw_codesharing is a good place to go to find an invite code, and if you're looking to move over a large group of people for a specific community or project, just open a support request in the Account Payments department and we'll hook you up with a bulk invite code.

Paid Accounts

It's been a while since I've explicitly mentioned it, so it's time for a reminder: Dreamwidth runs entirely on your payments. We don't accept money from outside investors or venture capitalists, and we don't run advertising. We think it's important that we only accept money from you guys, since you are the ones this service is built for, and taking money from anybody else means that we'd be focused on pleasing those people instead of pleasing you.

We finished out 2010 with really good results: we were only a few thousand dollars away from being "in the black", which is pretty darn amazing when you consider that we've only been open for a little over a year and a half and we were unable to accept payments for nearly the entire first quarter. I wanted to take a minute to say thank you to everyone who supported us with your cold hard cash (and everyone who continues to do so), because you're the ones who make it possible for us to keep providing this service, for you and for others.

Meanwhile, if you've been thinking about possibly supporting Dreamwidth with a paid account, now would be a great time! Paid accounts start at $3 for one month, and give you a bunch of awesome features, in addition to the warm and fuzzy glow you get from knowing that you help to keep a completely independent internet business running.

Three Weeks for Dreamwidth

Last year, for the first anniversary of DW being open for business, three_weeks_for_dw organized a really awesome site-wide block party of DW-specific content, hanging out, and squee. This year, they're back for another round! The party will start April 25, and is looking for your ideas.


*

That's it from us for now! 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 in two weeks for our next update. By then, hopefully our new kitten will have realized that chewing on toes is not a good way to endear himself to us. (Who am I kidding, he's adorable no matter what.)