Weekly Roundup: 27 July 2009

[mark]

Good evening! A little bit of a late start to the weekly news post, I decided when I got home from the day job that it was time for a powernap. Eventually, by the power of Mountain Dew and Taco Bell, I was revived.

1. Styles Update

For those of you waiting with bated breath for more styles, this past code push (Sunday night) we released the first version of Drifting. This style, created by jennielynn1127 was originally part of the LiveJournal styles contest and has now made its way over to Dreamwidth.

Also, I want to mention that afuna has been working really hard and contacting a lot of people who have submitted styles to various style communities on the site. We've gotten permission from a bunch of people to use their styles, so we're working on getting them put together to deploy sometime in the near future.

If you have a few minutes, we'd appreciate if you would take the time to look at this poll and fill it out:

http://dw-styles.dreamwidth.org/9934.html

We're trying to gather information on people's experience with our style system, process, and related. Thanks!

2. Journal Search

This is a popularly requested feature and one that we figured out this week how to do. It turns out it was pretty easy, given how straightforward the Sphinx search system is. The current implementation only took about two days.

If you don't know what I'm talking about - then you're missing out! Here, give it a whirl on our news community:

http://www.dreamwidth.org/search?search_user=dw_news

The search index is, currently, updated every six hours. There are more details about how it works in the announcement post.

Now, this doesn't mean we're "done" with search. There's a lot more left to do, but before we go any further with it, we need community feedback. One of the things we realized is that it would be trivial to make site-wide search work. I.e., you can search for something across all public posts on the site. No matter who posted it and when.

I personally think that's cool, but there's a lot of questions to answer before we can do something like that. Notably: do people want to be able to search the whole site? And if so, how should it work? Should people have to opt-in to having their journal content indexed? Or should it be opt-out? Etc, etc. Lots of things that need to be thought about before we do something like this.

That's where you come in! Please think about this, about how you would like a site-wide search option to work (or if you don't want one), and then let us know in the comments.

3. OSCON

This past week, denise and I attended the O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2009 in San Jose, CA. This is a yearly conference which brings together many thousands of people who are involved in various avenues of open source. Software, community, business, everybody.

Of particular interest at this year's conference is that the O'Reilly group invited damned_colonial to give a 15 minute keynote address (keynotes are generally viewed by thousands of attendees) titled Standing Out in the Crowd. For more information, see her post about it:

http://damned-colonial.dreamwidth.org/43962.html

This is one thing I want to take a moment and mention: Dreamwidth is not your "typical" Open Source project. We don't subscribe to the mentality that the only useful contributors are people who already know how to do things, but instead choose to believe that many hands make light work, it's better to teach someone to fish, etc. denise has a great post on the topic:

http://denise.dreamwidth.org/23600.html

As well as another OSCON flavored post, if you want some more information on how the convention went than what I can put in a news post:

http://denise.dreamwidth.org/23532.html

As you can probably tell from the depth of this section (I don't normally write so much!) this is a topic that we care about - a lot.

4. Spam Fix

Changing gears, you may have noticed a rather sharp drop in the amount of spam we've been receiving lately. It turns out that our spam team was blocking the spammers, but the site's "block spammer" function was broken.

Thanks goes to exor674 who first realized the problem, tested it, came up with a fix, and made sure the fix worked. According to our spam management team, we went from dozens reported every day to just a few.

And as a reminder to everybody: please, when you do see a spam comment or post, use the buttons to let us know! We have a bunch of people who watch the spam reports for trends, identify bots/problems, and deal with them. But it all starts with you clicking the "Mark as Spam" button.

5. Crossposting via Clients

This is mostly an FYI: this week we will be making a change to how the crossposter works so that third party clients like Semagic (and others) will be able to take advantage of having entries automatically crossposted.

We chose to make this change because it's going to be nearly impossible to get all third party clients to introduce new code just for Dreamwidth. Instead of telling people they can't crosspost with their favorite client, we've decided to make it work at our end.

6. Terms of Service Update

We had a few things in the past couple of weeks, our ToS team decided they have enough material for another post. If you're interested in the inner workings of the Dreamwidth Terms of Service Enforcement Team (wow, that's a mouthful), here you go:

http://dw-biz.dreamwidth.org/2069.html

Feedback is welcome - just comment on the entry! Everybody responsible for our Terms of Service policies will be reading them.

7. Ongoing Development

There were a lot of patches in the past week, as always! denise has once again made a code walkthrough to step everybody through exactly what was changed, how, and why:

http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/15082.html

In particular, bug #1449 (userpic in entry preview does not work when posting to a community) was fixed by kaisa -- her very first committed patch! Congratulations, and welcome to the Dreamwidth development team!

There are a lot of other high priority things coming down the pipe in the next few weeks. Reading filters will be available (at least basic filters, not sure about advanced filters) by the next code push (1-2 weeks), the crossposter will allow you to post without storing your password on Dreamwidth's servers, a bunch of work to redo the 'manage circle' page, etc etc.

If you have ideas for Dreamwidth that you'd like to share, or if you'd like to participate in deciding what gets implemented, please remember to use the dw_suggestions community. Your one stop shop for everything 'heyyyyy I have this ideaaaaa' related.

8. Cut!

This has been a really exciting week for us. Between the excitement over what we're doing by people at OSCON, the new features and bugs fixed, and our top notch team of volunteers, we have an exciting future. Stay tuned.

Comments

[nightowl]

I have no opinion on the implementation of site-wide search: I personally have no real desire to search in journals that aren't my own, but I can see others wanting to do so. However, if site-wide search is implemented, it should definitely be an opt-in service. I'd prefer not having my entries pop up in searches unless I want them to. Thanks for reading, and for doing all this great work. :)