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

Re: #5

[aveleh]

Yeah, we really wanted core2 to make everyone's lives easier :)

For non-official layout-makers, yup, it will be really easy for people to say what to set their style to if it's in the wizard (and since Dreamwidth lets everyone access the advanced customization area, you can even just give people the variables to paste into a layer).

I was more thinking about how it would make things harder for official themes. If the options are in the wizard, then official themes will have to work with those options. So, it wouldn't always be in the wizard but it would still make it easier for developers to access it.

(And I see that exor674 already answered about tables-converting.)

Re: #5

[rainfall]

Ahh, I see what you mean.

--I wonder, would it be possible, do you think, to set a variable when you move the entry items around that would let official layout-makers set different CSS for items depending on where they were in the entry? Something that would change the class name, for example, or add an additional class name you could call.

Re: #5

[rainfall]

Okay, I made a version of the code. I'm using it on my own LJ DW journal, too.

ETA: I separated the interaction ("comment") links from the management ("maintenance") links, since the default now seems to be icons for the maintenance links. I set those as my first item, the date as my second, the icon as my third, then entry text, then entry title, and finally comments.

If the user opts to load date and title next to each other, I currently have the code set to automatically wrap them in an additional "header" div, so that you could set a single background color and float them together to make a "bar" header, like on Flexible Squares. This extra div shouldn't cause any problems if people don't want to make them into a "bar", but the option is there.


Anyway! Currently the code is set for Tabula Rasa, mimicking it, but I imagine I could very easily give you a proper core2 version of it whenever you like. ♥ I'd love some pointers on how to code the actual propgroup, so as to lay out the options in a more aesthetically-pleasing way.

Also, I'm still interested in poking at the code to make it carry over the options chosen to comments -- right now I'm thinking, set it to call EntryLite instead of Entry -- and in attaching different CSS properties to things based on location. (A slightly bloated but extremely simple option would be to give things class names like "userpic first-item"; then you could attach basic CSS to that item by using the userpic class, and more specific CSS if it's also the first-item. Or something like that!)

Distracted, crises, so further testing will be sporadic. But feedback at this stage is appreciated, too. ♥

(I'm also using a style I'd like to offer up to you guys, if you're interested. I figure the font sizing should be tweaked some to make it more accessible, but it's elastic -- you can set the width of the #content div to be whatever, and the sidebars and main content are all sized in percentages, so you get an aspect ratio that can be as big as you want.

(The background is just some random stripes; I forget where I yanked them from, so I'll probably just make some other random background in PhotoShop. Bubbles or more vague stripes or something. I've already got a few color schemes made up for this layout, so once the custom comment page/archive page is fully-coded and pretty...)

Also, belatedly, yes -- I'd be happy to offer up a stylesheet for the main DW site. Something with a white background and black text, plus like green as an accent (read: link, header) color? Having guided people towards two alternate journaling sites, I kind of think LJ's default "white with blue" layout is a feature a lot of users miss when they move. DW's purple and red layouts might be prettier, but a plain white canvas leaves more options for profile layouts, etc.