Weekly Roundup: 10 August 2009

[denise]

Good evening, Dreamwidth! An unexpected nap (okay, I'll 'fess up, I slept through nearly all of Monday) means your update is late this week, but we've still got some territory to cover. Come with me on a tour of what we've been up to this week in DWville.

1. Development

We resolved 43 bugs this week, and welcome goes to our new contributors carynb, badgerbag, and chemicallace. A summary of this week's efforts can be found over at the Code Tour.

Meanwhile, our next code push should be happening sometime this week -- probably on the weekend. We'll announce it ahead of time in dw_maintenance when it happens, of course, but fair warning to everyone: we have a lot of cleanup work and code removal going live in this codepush, and while we think we've found most of the bugs, there's always a chance things might break. We'll be keeping a careful eye on things, but we ask for your patience!

2. New Stuff

New stuff that will be going live in the next code push includes:

* changes to the crossposter so that crossposted entries have an image displayed on the remote site with the current comment count of the entry on Dreamwidth;
* changes to comment email subjects so that -- hopefully -- GMail will start threading them properly;
* changes to the crossposter so that entries posted via a client will obey your crossposting settings;
* a "Paid Account Fairy" option, so you'll be able to make a payment to us that will be applied to a random active free user, to allow people to make payments to us even if they don't have anyone they want to pay for (and an option for you to opt out of the pool of potential recipients if you so choose);
* A whole bunch of miscellaneous bugfixes and display fixes.

One thing to note: we've done some CSS cleanup and fixed a few style display bugs, including a bug with the Transmogrified style that was preventing the font declaration from working in some browsers. You may note that your journal displays a little bit differently after the next codepush if your browser was one of the ones affected.

3. New Styles

Also with the next codepush, there'll be five new layouts to choose from, contributed by branchandroot, with even more to come.

We're still looking for more, so if you've got something pretty, you can submit it to dreamscapes for testing and conversion into a system style. If one of your layouts is added to the site, you'll get paid time, invite codes, and the undying gratitude of Dreamwidth users worldwide.

4. Diversity Statement

When we wrote our Diversity Statement, we kept it in the Dreamwidth-specific (and therefore not for public use) code repository, because we thought it was very Dreamwidth-specific (in the way we'd written it, etc). After some recent attention we've gotten in the open-source world, several people have contacted us and asked for permission to use our diversity statement as the basis of their own, and we realized we'd forgotten to explicitly license it under Creative Commons.

We've done so, and the next codepush will reflect that, but please do consider our diversity statement to be licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 BY-SA terms from here on out. We only ask that you update the guts of it to reflect your own site or project's purpose and specifics, instead of ours.

5. CSS Gurus Wanted

Anyone out there a wizard with CSS? We need someone to take the code that generated comment entry pages in the site schemes (which is old, crufty, and table-based) and update it to use CSS styling that can be made to look exactly the same. This is in preparation for some future code cleanup we have on the radar.

If you're interested, contact exor674.

6. Support

Support wishes to provide a giant thank you to everyone who's been helping out in the past month! If you're interested, check out dw_support_training for information and details. Volume's low, but we can always use more people around for when it picks up.

And, as always, if you have any questions about your Dreamwidth account or problems you'd like to report, Support volunteers are standing by.

7. Volunteering

This week has seen a serious push in our volunteer documentation on the Dreamwidth Wiki, with more to come. If you're interested in helping out, check out the Getting Started category for information on some of the various volunteer projects we have available.

8. HEY MARK HEY MARK

We've created a Twitter account to autopost our Nagios alerts! Nagios is the monitoring system we use to alert us to any problems with the site. An alert there doesn't mean that the site's down or unreachable. (In fact, because of the redundancy we have built into our system, we can lose about half the machines on the site and you guys would never even notice.) If the site's behaving weirdly, though, you may want to check it out.

As Mark put it: "Possibly spammy, dubiously useful, definitely cool." The feed is at dw_alerts.

(The "HEY MARK HEY MARK" joke comes from irc, where -- after a string of Nagios alerts were redirected to channel -- I observed that Nagios is much like a toddler following mark around a lot and tugging on his sleeve to get his attention.)

*

That's it for us for the 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 just want to come and hang out with us, join us in irc at irc.dwscoalition.org, channel #dw. We'll see you next week for our next update.

Comments

[yvi]

And, of course, you made http://twitter.com/dw_alerts show a new entry :)

Styles! Paid account fairy! GMail threading!

*hugs all of Dreamwidth*

[ratcreature]

* changes to the crossposter so that crossposted entries have an image displayed on the remote site with the current comment count of the entry on Dreamwidth;

Will this display if I allow comments on the other site or is this just if I redirect comment to be DW only? I think if it is the former it might have the odd effect that I'd be more likely to follow x-posting people on other sites, because there I could conveniently see both comment counts, wheras on DW I could only see one.

[denise]

It'll be something you can set in the custom crosspost footer message, so you can choose when it displays.

[ciaan]

Good point, it would be neat to see the number of LJ/IJ/whatev comments on the DW post, too.

[jeeps]

i live about five minutes away from google hq and i'm constantly tempted to just stomp in there and demand they start threading dreamwidth emails properly. jeez, guys.

[zarhooie]

Do it! Bring a camera <3

[tree]

oh a horse! with sword drawn and banner flying!

err, or not.

[torachan]

* changes to the crossposter so that crossposted entries have an image displayed on the remote site with the current comment count of the entry on Dreamwidth;
* changes to comment email subjects so that -- hopefully -- GMail will start threading them properly;

I'm really excited about these two!

[cesy]

I am very excited about Gmail threading.

[softestbullet]

Squeeeee gmail threading?!

[owl]

Oooh, loads of good things in this! When is the next codepush planned for?

[denise]

Should be sometime this weekend, most likely. We've been holding off a bit so we can run the code through its paces in development, since some of the changes we made this round are really sweeping...

[katieastrophe]

Weeeird. I thought the Gmail threading thing had been fixed ages ago. It's been working for me for months, anyway. Huzzah for it hopefully working for everyone else, though! :-)

[yvi]

For me, tt only works in that it threads 'entries' and 'comments', but it doesn't thread comments to post 1 together with other comments from post 1 and comments to post 2 together with other comments from post 2 - it threads them all together. Did it work differently for you?

[alittlebirdy]

Proper Gmail threading for the win! :D :D :D

Also, just want to add how refreshing it is to have a news update every week and one that isn't full of snark and bitching in the comments. Thankyou Dreamwidth. :)

[denise]

I'm really fond of that myself! Sometimes it's hard to find stuff to fill a news update every week, but Mark and I both think that you guys deserve to hear what we've been working on every week, whether it's big and showy or not. And the commenters here are awesome, and I hope we can keep that good vibe as we mature.

[ironed_orchid]

* changes to the crossposter so that crossposted entries have an image displayed on the remote site with the current comment count of the entry on Dreamwidth;

That is very neat.

[havocthecat]

Yes! That is so awesome. Which reminds me, I need to go and edit my crossposter a bit anyway.

[glitch]

Wow, all of this sounds exciting, but especially the Paid Account Fairy and the updated crossposter option. ♥

[the_shoshanna]

changes to the crossposter so that crossposted entries have an image displayed on the remote site with the current comment count of the entry on Dreamwidth

AWESOME. I mean, I asked for this ages ago and prefaced the request with "And if I can have a pony"; I had no idea it would actually be feasible.

[jaaaarne]

And where does one finds the Paid Account Fairy? I somehow feel I don't need it for myself, but maybe somebody else will make better use of it.

[denise]

It isn't live yet -- not until the next code push -- but when it is, it'll be linked under the Shop menu. The opt-out will be in the Privacy tab of the Account Settings page.

[sara]

changes to the crossposter so that crossposted entries have an image displayed on the remote site with the current comment count of the entry on Dreamwidth

Y'all are shiny!

(And Nagios should also be programmed to point out when various meals should be eaten. Because I shouldn't be the only one having this wonderful small-child-based experience.)

[ardath_rekha]

Honestly, maybe this is incredibly retro of me, but I prefer table-based layouts to CSS-based ones. When a site's CSS file fails to load, table-based layouts at least still generally resemble what they're supposed to look like; ones based in CSS look atrocious. And CSS-based layouts are sickeningly printer-unfriendly. I know the world's been <div>-happy for the past few years, but it really isn't all that great... especially when a .css fails to load.

I'm maintainer of an adults-only community, and one of the things that I do before admitting anyone to it is print-to-pdf their profile pages to make sure I have hard proof that they represented themselves as an adult. This is a mirror of a community on IJ. When I print-to-pdf there, things look fine, but over here, the resulting PDF looks heinously bad. It has the correct information, but it looks wretched. Half the profile information never even prints! Fortunately, the half that does print is the half I need most, but still, if I needed the rest, I'm not sure what I'd do. I've been considering opening a bug report on that for a while, as a matter of fact; I'm pretty sure it's the DIV coding that's doing it.

[foxfirefey]

I encourage you to submit a bug about it, since that's the kind of thing that should be fixed, but in the meantime I have a trick that might help you. If you go to someone's profile and put ?usescheme=lynx after the URL, then you'll probably have a version of the profile that prints out much better. It'll have a lot less of the stuff you don't need. Here is your profile using that site scheme:

http://ardath-rekha.dreamwidth.org/profile?usescheme=lynx

[srevans]

Paid account fairy = really cool idea. And so cheerfully community based!

What a shiny shiny group.

#5

[rainfall]

Not to be egotistical, but I consider myself a CSS guru, and changing tabled pages to div pages is actually one of my dorky hobbies.

May I sign up?

Re: #5

[rainfall]

Oh, and while I'm at it...

I put quite a bit of effort into making a layout that was more end-user friendly -- something that was easier for people to customize. Some of its features are multi-tiered tags (you can turn them off or on, and choose a deliminator character for them -- e.g., ":" or ";" or "!") and the ability to control what order items appear in an entry (userpic before the date and title? date and title together in one block? userpic at the bottom of the entry? date at the bottom of the entry? metadata (including tags) at the top of the entry? link bar at the top of the entry?).

It still needs more work -- it was originally made kind of just for me, with Inksome as its target, so I pulled out some of the advertising modules, but I didn't pull them all out, I don't think; and it was based off of Flexible Squares, because that was one layout I'd worked with before and knew a fair bit about, and because I knew it had a sidebar you could tweak; I need to pass on changes made to the entries to the comments on custom comment pages (userpic appearing wherever, etc.) -- but I think it'd be a great official layout, when I'm done with it.

If you like the sound of it, I'd be happy to start tweaking right away -- if it having been based on Flexible Squares originally makes you nervous, I can tear it apart and use Generator as a base instead or something.

Etc.

[instantramen]

Some of the new stuff this week is unexpectedly exciting. I can't wait for the next code push!

[trobadora]

I have a completely unrelated question, and I'm not sure where to ask it, so I'm putting it here: Are you going to make it possible to reply to comments from the form in the notification email without logging in? Because not being able to do that that's proving a serious pain, and I can only imagine how frustrating it would be if I actually tried to migrate a secondary account to DW.

[charmian]

Seconded here.

[ladydreamer]

All the new stuff sounds really cool! Especially,
changes to the crossposter so that crossposted entries have an image displayed on the remote site with the current comment count of the entry on Dreamwidth;

Awesome!

[galateus]

* changes to comment email subjects so that -- hopefully -- GMail will start threading them properly;

Oh good, I was just starting to notice that problem. I should've realized it'd be a known issue.

Now if only the rival journalsites would do the same...

[denise]

The problem is that GMail is stupid, actually -- they don't obey any of the headers that they should use to determine that something's the same thread, like the References and In-Reply-To headers or anything. They just go by subject alone.