![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Weekly Post: October 12th, 2009
Monday, the 12th of October, and time for another weekly update about what's going on over here in the land of Dreamwidth.
This will be a little short and one-sided, mostly owing to the fact that I spent the whole day coding and forgot it's Monday, but I'll try to cover the highlights. And without further ado...
Early last week (shortly after the update) we did a code push to bring live many of the exciting new things we'd been working on. I didn't call them out in advance, so, I'd like to do so now.
First up, we pushed a change that makes all posts start to crosspost automatically. This means that those of you who use services that post to Dreamwidth from another web site or client (Twitter repeaters, Semagic, other clients) will see your posts automatically start crossposting. If you don't want this behavior you can turn it off in the Manage Account page on the Other Sites tab. I know this came as a surprise for some people, so I apologize that this wasn't as well messaged as it should have been.
Second, we have a neat new feature that has long been asked for but just got implemented by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yvi. If you have been maintaining an entry that shows up on top of all of your other entries by dating it far in the future, you don't have to do that anymore. We added the ability to specify a "sticky entry" that will always show up at the top of your journal, no matter what style you use. You can set this on the Manage Account page, Display tab.
Third, our styles team has been working really hard at building new styles. Sometimes, we find things that have to change in the core or in some of the layouts that power everybody's journals. If you ever find that your journal has suddenly gone weird (like a tribble took up residence in the corner or maybe even worse!) please feel free to let us know. If you file a support request or comment in the latest![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_maintenance post, we'll do our best to figure out what we changed and how to fix your style. We can't promise that we will always be able to, but we'll try our best.
This week we closed 28 bugs (resolved!) and would like to give a special hand toyati who is a first time contributor this week. Thank you so much for helping make the site a better place. :)
Our code tour this week was put together by the tirelessfoxfirefey:
http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/26557.html
We made good progress on the review queue this week, too. I sat down and got the queue down to some 40 patches still needing review and the oldest being ~2 weeks old. This is still far too old, but the week was spent reviewing some of the bigger, more gnarly patches. The remaining few dozen should go faster. (Famous last words...)
I promised before that this week we'd work on site search: and we have! Today I committed the bulk of the new code and I just have a few more tweaks to do before it can be pushed out with the next code push. (Sometime within the next week?)
Search is one of the things that we really want to do, and do well. But a lot of people expressed concern over privacy and making things too easy to find. We had a really good discussion on this in adw_news post a few months ago and from that Denise and I put together a plan to address the privacy concerns in a way we felt was the best compromise between providing maximum security out of the box and still giving you a feature that works great.
There are two facets to the new things we're doing to search, so I'll break it down into the two components. Site Search lets you search for new content somewhere on Dreamwidth, and Journal Search is an expanded form of what we have today: finding content in a specific journal.
Site Search will let you search public posts (and only public posts!) on Dreamwidth and will be available to all users: even free users. I feel that this is a great community tool and will really help people to connect and find interesting content, so we're going to try to make this available to all users. (If the load demands turn out different than we expect, we MAY have to change this. Fair warning.)
Now, security and privacy concerns. Any search system is only as worthwhile as the usefulness of the data it indexes. We want to make sure that having site search is a useful thing, so we're making the system opt-out. However! We are going to automatically opt-out everybody who has chosen the "minimize my journal's inclusion in search engines" option. In other words, if you already opt-out of search inclusion (for external search engines) we will automatically opt you out of Dreamwidth's new Site Search.
Once the feature goes live, you are welcome to go turn it on, of course. I'd encourage you to do so: having content available to be found is one thing that will really help Dreamwidth to grow and users to connect, so while you may not want your content appearing on other search engines, I hope you will consider letting it be found from within the site.
Journal Search is the other side of search: you know the content is in a certain journal but you just don't remember which entry it's in exactly. Right now, we already have the ability for you to search your own journal and communities. We are extending this option to allow you to search other people's journals -- but of course, with their consent.
A new option is being added to the Privacy tab of the Manage Account page: "allow search by". You can specify that you want to allow everybody to search your journal, only people on your access list (default), or only you. I believe that limiting it to your access list is the best compromise of utility and privacy.
If you have any comments or thoughts, I'd love to hear them. I expect both Site Search and Journal Search to be released in the coming week. It will take some time to actually port the search index over to the new format, too, so when this is going out there may be a 6-12 hour downtime of the search system. I'll try to keep it short and will keepdw_maintenance and Twitter updated.
If you have been interested in contributing to the overall styles experience on Dreamwidth -- from the S2 system itself to the pages used to make styles to the styles themselves -- please see this post indw_styles:
http://dw-styles.dreamwidth.org/11790.html
We're not just looking for people to make styles; we're very much looking for people who want to improve the experience of building a style, selecting them, organizing or customizing or whatever. Even the language itself, if you really want to get down and mess with it.
Okay; short update this week. I have been asked to do one community promo:
* Shuttercookie is a new magazine for people who like photography and freedom and open source, but in order to publish anything, it needs contributors! If you're interested, take a look at the community:![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
shuttercookie.
We'll see you next week, when hopefully I will be telling you that we've successfully launched search and other new features and fixes for the week and have gotten our review queue down to 72-hours-max!
This will be a little short and one-sided, mostly owing to the fact that I spent the whole day coding and forgot it's Monday, but I'll try to cover the highlights. And without further ado...
1. Code Push
Early last week (shortly after the update) we did a code push to bring live many of the exciting new things we'd been working on. I didn't call them out in advance, so, I'd like to do so now.
First up, we pushed a change that makes all posts start to crosspost automatically. This means that those of you who use services that post to Dreamwidth from another web site or client (Twitter repeaters, Semagic, other clients) will see your posts automatically start crossposting. If you don't want this behavior you can turn it off in the Manage Account page on the Other Sites tab. I know this came as a surprise for some people, so I apologize that this wasn't as well messaged as it should have been.
Second, we have a neat new feature that has long been asked for but just got implemented by
yvi. If you have been maintaining an entry that shows up on top of all of your other entries by dating it far in the future, you don't have to do that anymore. We added the ability to specify a "sticky entry" that will always show up at the top of your journal, no matter what style you use. You can set this on the Manage Account page, Display tab.Third, our styles team has been working really hard at building new styles. Sometimes, we find things that have to change in the core or in some of the layouts that power everybody's journals. If you ever find that your journal has suddenly gone weird (like a tribble took up residence in the corner or maybe even worse!) please feel free to let us know. If you file a support request or comment in the latest
dw_maintenance post, we'll do our best to figure out what we changed and how to fix your style. We can't promise that we will always be able to, but we'll try our best.2. Development
This week we closed 28 bugs (resolved!) and would like to give a special hand to
yati who is a first time contributor this week. Thank you so much for helping make the site a better place. :)Our code tour this week was put together by the tireless
foxfirefey:http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/26557.html
We made good progress on the review queue this week, too. I sat down and got the queue down to some 40 patches still needing review and the oldest being ~2 weeks old. This is still far too old, but the week was spent reviewing some of the bigger, more gnarly patches. The remaining few dozen should go faster. (Famous last words...)
3. Site Search
I promised before that this week we'd work on site search: and we have! Today I committed the bulk of the new code and I just have a few more tweaks to do before it can be pushed out with the next code push. (Sometime within the next week?)
Search is one of the things that we really want to do, and do well. But a lot of people expressed concern over privacy and making things too easy to find. We had a really good discussion on this in a
dw_news post a few months ago and from that Denise and I put together a plan to address the privacy concerns in a way we felt was the best compromise between providing maximum security out of the box and still giving you a feature that works great.There are two facets to the new things we're doing to search, so I'll break it down into the two components. Site Search lets you search for new content somewhere on Dreamwidth, and Journal Search is an expanded form of what we have today: finding content in a specific journal.
Site Search will let you search public posts (and only public posts!) on Dreamwidth and will be available to all users: even free users. I feel that this is a great community tool and will really help people to connect and find interesting content, so we're going to try to make this available to all users. (If the load demands turn out different than we expect, we MAY have to change this. Fair warning.)
Now, security and privacy concerns. Any search system is only as worthwhile as the usefulness of the data it indexes. We want to make sure that having site search is a useful thing, so we're making the system opt-out. However! We are going to automatically opt-out everybody who has chosen the "minimize my journal's inclusion in search engines" option. In other words, if you already opt-out of search inclusion (for external search engines) we will automatically opt you out of Dreamwidth's new Site Search.
Once the feature goes live, you are welcome to go turn it on, of course. I'd encourage you to do so: having content available to be found is one thing that will really help Dreamwidth to grow and users to connect, so while you may not want your content appearing on other search engines, I hope you will consider letting it be found from within the site.
Journal Search is the other side of search: you know the content is in a certain journal but you just don't remember which entry it's in exactly. Right now, we already have the ability for you to search your own journal and communities. We are extending this option to allow you to search other people's journals -- but of course, with their consent.
A new option is being added to the Privacy tab of the Manage Account page: "allow search by". You can specify that you want to allow everybody to search your journal, only people on your access list (default), or only you. I believe that limiting it to your access list is the best compromise of utility and privacy.
If you have any comments or thoughts, I'd love to hear them. I expect both Site Search and Journal Search to be released in the coming week. It will take some time to actually port the search index over to the new format, too, so when this is going out there may be a 6-12 hour downtime of the search system. I'll try to keep it short and will keep
dw_maintenance and Twitter updated.4. Styles Development Opening Up
If you have been interested in contributing to the overall styles experience on Dreamwidth -- from the S2 system itself to the pages used to make styles to the styles themselves -- please see this post in
dw_styles:http://dw-styles.dreamwidth.org/11790.html
We're not just looking for people to make styles; we're very much looking for people who want to improve the experience of building a style, selecting them, organizing or customizing or whatever. Even the language itself, if you really want to get down and mess with it.
5. Signing Off...for now!
Okay; short update this week. I have been asked to do one community promo:
* Shuttercookie is a new magazine for people who like photography and freedom and open source, but in order to publish anything, it needs contributors! If you're interested, take a look at the community:
shuttercookie.We'll see you next week, when hopefully I will be telling you that we've successfully launched search and other new features and fixes for the week and have gotten our review queue down to 72-hours-max!