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.

[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.

[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?

[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! :-)

[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...

[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.

[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?

[owl]

Oh, one of those releases :D I know all too well.

As an end user, I'm looking forward to teh results of s successful codepush :)

[denise]

I think we actually wound up touching nearly every file in the overall structure of the site! And I'm sure there are some errors lurking in there that won't be noticed until we push -- one of the things we did was change function calls to be more object-oriented (so instead of if $u->{statusvis} eq 'V', using if $u->is_visible), and I'm almost positive this will reveal some autovivification problems that have been lurking in the codebase for years.

And since both of the major sweeping patches were mine, I'm pretty sure I'm going to earn the I Broke The Build Badge a few more times in the next release... :)

[ciaan]

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

[cesy]

I think (though I may have misunderstood) that would require a change on LJ's end. Possibly worth submitting as a suggestion here anyway, though, just in case there's a way around it.

[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.

[havocthecat]

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

[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.

[afuna]

Hmm, you know, I don't think it's in the menu. It's linked from the /shop page, but not directly from the Shop menu.

[denise]

Oooh. Wanna open a bug for that? We should make it easy for people to give us money! (And, okay, that menu is shorter than the rest and could stand some lengthening.)