Weekly Update: 14 September 2009

[denise]

It's now eight days until sarah and I are going on vacation, and 16 days until mark's last day at his dayjob (and thus, working fulltime for Dreamwidth). (And it's a toss-up as to whether mark or I is more excited about having him fulltime.)

That's not all we have to be excited about in this week's update, though. Come with me as we take a tour of this week's activity in Dreamwidthville.

1. Development

This week saw the resolution of 30 bugs FIXED, and you can see the list in this week's code tour (or, for those who want to watch the development as it goes by, in changelog or changelog_digest). A code push this weekend means that all of these patches, plus those from the last two weeks, are now live on the site and available for use.

A huge welcome this week goes to new contributor ninetydegrees, who provided a new layout for us: Funky Circles. (More about layouts in a few!)

I'd also like to take a second to highlight some awesome work this weekend. When we did our code push, we found a bug in production that we hadn't caught in our testing that was causing CPU usage on our webservers to max out (thus making the site fall down go boom). That's not the part to be proud of. The part to be proud of is the fact that, thanks to the quick work and dedicated troubleshooting of our crack IRC crew, the elapsed time from first spotting to final fix was under 15 minutes.

(I owe mark a beer, too; my working theory about what was causing it was wrong, while his was right.)

2. Reading Filters are here!

You heard it here! This weekend's code push brought us the long-awaited alpha release of reading filters. Now, you can sort your reading page into sub-categories for easy management.

Free users can use the basic version of filters, where you can build sub-sets of your subscriptions list so that only certain accounts show at a time. Paid users, though, have access to a number of other options.

Can't stop yourself from browsing DW at work, but your boss has a habit of dropping by and watching your screen? Create a filter that includes everyone on your subscription list, but set each user to only display entries that aren't marked as adult content. Want to be able to easily see any posts made by community administrators? Create a filter that only includes posts made by the comm maintainer. Is there someone you read who posts great entries usually, but you can't stand her posts tagged 'whining'? Create a filter that includes all of her posts except the ones with that tag. Is there someone you're reading only for his fiction? Create a filter that only shows you his posts taggged 'fiction'.

The great thing about tag-based filters is that, unlike subscription notifications, filters work based on what tags the entry has at the time you load your reading page, not when the entry was posted. So, if you've got someone you read who only tags her posts after the fact (making subscribing by tag useless), tag-based reading filters will still catch them for you.

The feature's still very much in "alpha" mode (not even ready for beta yet!), and we know you're going to have a lot of great suggestions about how to improve them. You can make your suggestions through our Suggestions process. We'll be updating and refining the system based on your feedback and our own observations.

You can get started using reading filters by going to the Manage Subscription Filters page.

3. Layouts

After last week's poll in dw_styles about how you look for the right layout for your journal, we've taken your feedback into account and added a new view to our Select a Style page. Now, you can view every available base layout in one place. Be sure to click through to the second page or increase the number of styles shown on the page to see all of the options!

This code push introduced five new layouts: Blanket by sforzinda, Bases by sven, Sunday Morning by regna, Tranquility III by branchandroot, and Funky Circles by ninetydegrees. The worst part is going to be having to choose!

In the customize area, you can always see all of the available color and image options for each layout by clicking the layout name. Remember, the preview image thumbnail shown in the Customize area isn't the only option for each layout. You can pick different column layouts, customize your colors, and move things around on the page. Play with options in the Customize Theme page until you find something you like.

This week's update from the hard-working dw_styles team can be found in this dw_styles entry. Be sure to drop by and give them thumbs up for all their incredibly hard work in the past few months -- they've been doing an incredible job.

4. Layout Submissions

So that everyone can use the results of your layout creativity, submit it to us! zvi has created a detailed, step-by-step tutorial on creating color themes. You don't need to know any programming -- you don't even need to know how to use HTML or CSS. The most advanced skill required really is cut and paste!

We accept -- heck, we eagerly jump all over -- any style submission to the dreamscapes community, and we're especially looking for color themes for existing layouts. In particular, we want to make sure that every layout has a good selection of both light-on-dark and dark-on-light options, with as many high-contrast choices as possible.

Meanwhile, if you have awesome HTML layout-making skills but don't know (and don't want to learn) S2, our layout language, or if you can make S2 sit up and bark but lack the artistic inspiration to design layouts, fear not. We've got a matchup post for designers seeking coders or coders seeking designers. There's also a post for artists to leave links to their work, for header and background images, so if you have some art to offer up we'd love to see it!

You'll receive two months of paid time and five invite codes for every theme that's accepted onto the site, whether it be an entirely new layout or a color theme for an existing layout. Help contribute to the styles explosion!

5. How Edge-y!

This past code push also included a way for people to extract relationship "edge" data in computer-readable form -- which is a really fancy way of saying that there's now a easily computer-readable form of the relationship information available on the Profile page. This will make it easier for people to program useful toys and tools, such as the popular Joule tool, which tracks who's added (or removed) you as a friend on LiveJournal.

foxfirefey, who together with mark did this patch, has already used this tool to figure out some nifty statistics. For instance, 50% of Dreamwidth usernames are between 7 and 12 characters long; 9 characters is the average, and 7 is the most common. See the graph of username lengths she made.

If you come up with a cool toy using this data, or want to see what other people come up with, check out the unofficial community memewidth!

6. Suggestions

Earlier, I mentioned that suggestions for improving reading filters should go through our Suggestions form. Since it's been a while since we implemented the Suggestions form, I thought it might be a nice moment to stop and look back over some of the suggestions that we've already implemented.

Past suggestions that are now live on the site:

• Split 'give a gift' page into personal accounts and communities
  
• Number of invite codes on "invite someone" page
  
• Option to get notified by email when you send a message
  
• Modify Layout of Page to Edit Linkslist
  
• Add additional color specifications for anchor tags in Transmogrified
  
• Change subject line for poll response emails
  
• Add the option to send a message while adding someone to your circle
  
• S2: New tag classes on the Tags page
  
• Extra "Save" button on Manage Subscriptions page

There are many more fabulous suggestions that have been added to the bug tracker and will be implemented as soon as someone has the spare cycles to write a patch. You can view implemented suggestions using the "bugzilla: implemented" tag of dw_suggestions. (This tag may lag slightly behind the actual implemented suggestions count -- it's a manual process to update it, and I only do that when I remember.)

You can also view, discuss, and vote on others' suggestions! Currently-active suggestions are posted with the "untagged" tag; any suggestion thus tagged hasn't had a final decision made yet. The "bugzilla: migrated" tag contains all suggestions that have been put into our bug-tracking software, which means it will get added to the code as soon as someone has the time to devote to it.

We've added 72 things to the bug tracker so far based on your suggestions (the tag number is doubled due to invisible administrative entries), and more come in every day. Part of our vision for Dreamwidth involves making improvements that reflect how you use the site, so if there's anything at all that would make your Dreamwidth experience smoother, drop by the Suggestions form and leave us your ideas.

7. Bug Reports

We are still in beta, though we're getting closer and closer to being ready for an official site launch every day, and beta means bugs: things that just plain don't work right, as opposed to things that work as they are but could work better.

It can be hard sometimes to tell whether something is "working as designed, but as designed could be improved" vs "this is a bug and needs to be fixed". If you know that something's a bug, though -- you get an error message, or something displays wrong in your browser, or something like that -- you should report it to Support. Our team of volunteers will work with you to diagnose the problem, figure out how to reproduce it, and add it to our bug tracker for fixing.

You can always find the link to the Support center any time you're looking at a site page. In Tropospherical Red and Tropospherical Purple, it's on the top left of the page (next to your icon), labeled 'Help'. In Celerity, it's on the top right of the page, also labeled 'Help'. There's also a link to the FAQ under the "Explore" menu.

Huge thanks go to our support volunteers, who have been doing an absolutely stellar job! You can see the list of support high scores to see whom to thank, and check out dw_support_training if you want to get involved yourself.


*

That's it from us for another week! (Now that it's taken me something like five hours to write this...) 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. (Warning: studies have shown that participation in #dw may result in volunteerism in test subjects.)

We'll see you next week for our next update.

Comments

[cyprinella]

One of the code pushes way back in the beginning did something to custom lay-outs pulled over from LJ that made all of the usernames on posts disappear. I'm seeing that on my network page now. Anyone have a link to the fix? I can't seem to find it.

[foxfirefey]

I think the fix is something like:

The $.view on the Network page now uses "network", instead of "read"; looks like that broke the logic that your style was using to print out the username. If you change $.view == "read" to $.view == "read" or $.view == "network", that should clear this right up.

(Shamelessly stolen from afuna.)

PS: I like your icon!