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Weekly Roundup: 10 August 2009
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.
We resolved 43 bugs this week, and welcome goes to our new contributors![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
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!
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.
Also with the next codepush, there'll be five new layouts to choose from, contributed bybranchandroot, with even more to come.
We're still looking for more, so if you've got something pretty, you can submit it todreamscapes 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.
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.
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, contactexor674.
Support wishes to provide a giant thank you to everyone who's been helping out in the past month! If you're interested, check outdw_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.
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.
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![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
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.
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.
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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.
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http://ardath-rekha.dreamwidth.org/profile?usescheme=lynx
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Since I've just volunteered to change layouts over to divs, I'd be happy to include a "print" stylesheet on all the ones I fix, so as to further help your problem. (If this is something DW staff is interested in, of course.)
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I'd be happy to help, just as soon as I know where to poke around. X3 (This would involve changing the print_stylesheet function in core2, right? So I could poke at it at the same time that I'm adding the entry-item-tweaking option?)
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(And