dw-progress: 2 March 2009

[mark]

Góðan dagan! :-)

We interrupt your email to bring you this startling announcement... Mark is writing the progress report! That's right, I'll be your captain this week.

Let me start off by saying - wow, what a week! This week we've seen a lot more people posting on the closed beta site. Actually seeing people post and update their journals on Dreamwidth is just amazing to me, and I'm really excited. (Every post on my reading page makes me squee loudly. Truth!)

I've also moved my posting to Dreamwidth fulltime. You can read about my life at http://xb95.dreamwidth.org/ - should you be so inclined. :-)

Now, on to the progress report!

1. CODE PROGRESS
----------------

[Note: where I reference people - I refer to their Dreamwidth accounts in parenthesis - so you can go look at their journals on DW! Also, I tend to run on at the fingers, apologies!]

Our programmers have kept clipping along this week, resolving 34 bugs in the bug tracking system. This week has seen major progress on several fronts, and here's a callout on our outstanding volunteer team.

* Janine (janinedog) cleaned up the ESN (events, subscriptions, and notifications) system to work with "Project WTF" (the split of 'friends' into reading lists and access lists). We have shiny new notifications! She did a bunch of other work too, and is this week's Bug Champion, resolving 8 bugs!

* One of our newer developers, Juliet (juliet), worked on the profile page and some backend admin tools that we will need to maintain a high quality service. She's already looking for more projects to conquer!

* Andrea (exor674) worked on the adult content system, fixing some bugs with the redirects and language used on the site. She's been helping me with the importer this week too, and this is a week before her finals at school -- ack! We all hope for good grades and a saner schedule for Dre in the coming term. :)

* Sophie (sophie) braved the FAQ and OpenID pages to clean them up and give us some usability improvements. Thank you!

* Afuna (afuna) fixed bugs in the invite code system, memcaching of icon keywords, and offered to grow a beard - only later to turn it down. Darn, we will have to work harder to convince her for next time. ;)

* The exceedingly fabulous Denise (denise) fixed a few bugs this week, as well! Focusing on display/presentation issues with our new site scheme, making pages look great. She also spent an entire day reorganizing LJ::User, 8,000 lines of code! This is no small feat and she deserves mad props for dealing with what is truly this week's Shambling Horror Shout Out.

* Rho, our very own Documentation Administrator, also contributed code this week! She added Creative Commons licensing to the FAQ display pages as well as created a swank Open Source page so we can point people to. (You know when the documentation people get into code, you're cooking with the good stuff!)

And last but not least, a big shout out to our committers (PauAmma [pauamma] and Afuna) who help each week to enable all of our volunteers to get their code reviewed and committed in a timely fashion. Without them I'd never get any coding of my own done. :)

Oh, and if you're curious what I did this week - I spent most of my time on the content importer. You can now import your entries from LiveJournal.com and InsaneJournal.com on the DW beta site. Although to be honest, when one of our new beta members tried to import her 24,000 entries, she exposed a few snags in the system... We're working on it! ;)


2. KEEPING UP
-------------

I don't think it's been mentioned -- but this week we've started posting announcements and updates to the dw_news community:

http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/

Another useful page is now a wiki page that documents the communities we are using on the site. If you are looking for more stuff to read, check 'em out:

http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Dreamwidth_Communities


3. EXPANDING CLOSED BETA
------------------------

We have started gradually expanding the number of people in the closed beta site. To give you an idea, we are now up to 75 personal accounts, 31 communities, 25 feeds, and 256 OpenID accounts. While a certain number of these are test accounts, there's no arguing with the statistics:

16,137 entries
5,900 comments
4,092 tags
805 userpics

I'm quite proud of closed beta's progress and look forward to expanding it even more over the coming weeks. "What's that you say? Expanding closed beta even more?!"

Why yes, the plan is sometime in the next few weeks to give people a way to Opt In to the closed beta on a lottery basis. You put your email address in, we send out some number of invite codes every few days, and we see how things go. Stay tuned for a link in an upcoming Progress Report!


4. OPEN BETA STATUS
-------------------

We are still working hard on getting things ready for beta. Denise has put together a really nice page on the wiki that talks about this in depth:

http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Dreamwidth.org:_Launch_timeline

The synopsis is that we are still planning on open beta in mid-April. We are on track and that timeframe looks good. "All engines are Go!"


5. SITE COPY
------------

*IMPORTANT*

We are really looking for people to help us with site copy. Not only will this get you into the closed beta (hey, we need everybody who is helping us to be able to use the site!), but you will be doing a very necessary task - making the site usable!

If this kind of thing appeals to you, check out this wiki page:

http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Site_copy_team

And of course, if you have any questions about the process or need further clarification, please feel free to contact our documentation admin Rho (rho@rho.me.uk).


6. GET MORE INVOLVED
--------------------

Dreamwidth is the kind of thing that happens because everybody gets out and pushes. Your individual point of view, individual needs, individual character will help define what Dreamwidth can be. All it takes is a bit of time! I'll copy from Denise's post last week:

http://lists.dwscoalition.org/mailman/listinfo/dw-accessibility : The mailing list to plan Dreamwidth's accessibility features for people with particular needs such as screenreader-friendliness, keyboard-navigation friendliness, etc. See the wiki notes at: http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Category:Accessibility . The project leader for this project is rickybuchanan.

http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-docs : The mailing list for Dreamwidth's documentation. See the wiki notes at: http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Category:Documentation. The user documentation (FAQ) team is already hard at work, but this mailing list is also for people who are interested in working with the site copy team and people who are interested in doing proofreading. The project leader for this project is rho.

http://tinyurl.com/ap4whs : Call for mood themes. If you, or anybody you know, has a mood theme that's all your own artwork and you're interested in licensing the mood theme to Dreamwidth for site inclusion, contact Denise (denise@dreamwidth.org).

Finally, there's still the process of mining the LiveJournal suggestions community for useful and valid suggestions that may contribute to the Dreamwidth project. The main Wiki page for this can be found at:

http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/From_LJ_Suggestions

If you have something that you think would fit into Dreamwidth, you can leave it on one of the Wishlist pages for now:

http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Category:Wishlists

Once we launch into open beta, we'll have an official "submit a suggestion" process, where you can bring your suggestions to the community and to us for consideration. In the meantime, though, we're tracking them on the Wiki so we don't lose anybody's ideas.


7. TALK, TALK!
--------------

It's been quiet the past week or two (because we've been heads down working!) but the dw-discuss mailing list is available if you want to talk about the project, ask questions, or generally just be around:

http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss

For semi-regular updates on what-we-did-today, check out our Twitter account:

http://twitter.com/dreamwidth

Syndicated onto LJ:

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/dw_twitter/profile

(It's not the most reliable syndication in the world, but it'll get the messages to you eventually.)

For more real-time discussion, commentary, and the ability to consign things to hell -- or at least, to our irc bot "hEll" -- come join us in irc:

irc.dwscoalition.org, port 6667, channel #dw

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Fulsome praises for all our volunteer coders who've been coding their little fingers off this week? Email me at mark@dreamwidth.org or comment to the Dreamwidth version of this newsletter update (which you are now reading).

This update has been brought to you by, in no particular order, Red Bull and the new Prodigy album "Invaders Must Die."

Comments

[afuna]

Hooray for us this week!

PS. Dre was the one who fixed the userpics+memcache thing. I've been working on S2/misc bugs + reviewing/committing.

[afuna]

Oh wait, that other fix! I forgot I did that.

[janinedog]

I am Bug Champion, yay!

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on the progress!

[elizabeth]

Way to guilt me into working on my site copy, Mark. No really, way.

[denise]

He's surprisingly good at that, isn't he?

[elizabeth]

Well, you're so unsurprisingly good at writing tech explanations for the non-techie that *cough* we *cough* may be linking to your web 2.0 economy post next week.

*cough*

[denise]

We aim to please! (Both of us.)

[elizabeth]

....D, you cannot say things like that when I am at work. My mind goes to The Bad Place.

::wanders over to IM to explain what This Bad Place looks like, in detail::

Dear lord, but I love that I can say that to the site owners here and not feel weird.

[mark]

I am a sweet and innocent boy, I have no idea what you are talking about. It's all puppies and storks for me!

<_<;;

[denise]

Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

[denise]

*cackle* I can fill in my own blanks, mostly. ;)

[rho]

I am entirely in favour of people being guilt tripped into working on site copy!

[elizabeth]

::trips and falls on ass::

[jeshyr]

Yay for progress!

Also, my blog here is 'rb' not 'rickybuchanan' as it is on LJ. Short names FTW.

Hope rahaeli enjoyed her break from writing the report - nice to hear another voice :)

[sqrfruit.livejournal.com]

It's so exciting to see this site take shape and fill out. Keep it up, guys!