Entry tags:
Weekly Update: 30 November 2009
Greetings, dwenizens! I hope that everyone who celebrated Thanksgiving this past week had a good one, and that nobody was permanently maimed in the annual paean to commerciality that is Black Friday. (Circumstances forced us to make a visit to IKEA. It was frightening.)
This week brings us a miscellaney, or perhaps an assortment; one of these days I'll figure out the right word to use. I'd also like to use this opportunity and audience to announce that everybody should go out and buy a copy of Changing the World, the latest anthology of stories set in Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar universe, available tomorrow, as Yours Truly is the co-author of the second story in the book. (And if you order your copy through that link, I get Amazon referral credit as well as royalties, too!) It's my first appearance in print -- although not my first sale, which will be coming out in another few months -- and I'm ridiculously proud of it.
Behind the cut: development updates, messages from a few project teams, Dreamwidth-in-person, community promo, a few things we'd like your opinion on, and the handover to Mark for next month's updates.
Our development efforts this week bring about a few things that I've been looking forward to for a while. The full tally can be found in this week's code tour, done by the fabulous![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yvi, but there are two big additions that have been frequently-requested and that I'm really looking forward to having live:
* "Admins only" security level. This adds a new option, by analogy with the 'private' security level, when posting in communities: community admins can use this security level, and it will only be visible to other community admins. No longer will you need to maintain a separate "admin community" for high-traffic or high-profile communities with multiple maintainers; a judicious combination of tags and admin-only security level will let you do all the administrative work to keep your community in good order all in one place.
* Icon keyword renaming. As everyone with a fondness for icons knows, if you rename an icon's keywords (maybe you've changed your naming scheme, or discovered a typo that's been there for months and you just realized) all previous uses of the icon revert to default, because the keyword has been changed. Well, thanks toallen's hard work -- and I mean 'hard work'; this patch went through a ton of revision -- you will soon be able to pick whether or not you want to update old posts to use the new keywords, thus making sure that your old posts keep showing the right icon even though you've changed the icon's name.
All of these enhancements, plus more (including fixes to tag editing in communities, accessibility-related changes to the alt text on user tags, bug fixes for the inbox to make the single-entry view work properly, and several new themes) will be available with the next code push, which will be announced in![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_maintenance.
Two questions for you this week:
* Do folks find the weekly code tours interesting/informative/useful to y'all? We like doing them -- it's good for us to look back over things that we've accomplished -- but I wanted to check in and see if people find the posts useful and informative, or if there's anything else we should be adding in them.
* The Support Triumvirate suggested that we do a companion weekly post, of all new bugs/enhancement requests that were filed in our bug tracker that week, so people can see the sort of issues we have on our radar. I like the idea, although my impulse is to say that we should save the effort for other things, since it's possible to get Bugzilla to email you about all new tickets filed, but if it's something people would really be interested in, we could probably find someone to do it (or script something to make Bugzilla email a weekly report in as an email post). Would y'all be interested in that?
The antispam team would like to thank everyone who's been deleting (and properly marking as spam) anonymous spam comments quickly. Through everyone's efforts, and the fact that our antispam team is really on the ball, it's sometimes a matter of minutes between when a spammer is brought to our attention and when we take steps to block them from continuing the spam, which is part of what keeps any given spam attack isolated to only a few journals.
96% of our spam reports are still invalid/not actually spam, but the remaining 4% are handled with alacrity. (I am amused, and slightly baffled, to report that this week's spam trend seems to be quoting Plato.)
The Support team (all praise be to their devotion) would like me to remind people that if you find yourself unable to log in for any reason, and need to contact them, you can do so without logging into your Dreamwidth account first. Just hit up the Submit Support Request page and provide your name and email address.
Meanwhile, Support also would like to remind people that if you ever find a page that you can't load for some reason -- for instance, several of our pages don't function well in older browsers like Internet Explorer 6 -- you can choose the Lynx site scheme on the Display tab of the Account Settings page for your account. Lynx, or light mode, is a low-formatting site scheme that works well for screenreaders, mobile devices, and older browsers.
We have a lot of bugs open to improve the process of selecting your browsing preferences and making them stick -- for both the site-styled pages and journal-styled pages. In the meantime, though, if you ever find that you can't load a single page, there's a workaround: add ?usescheme=lynx to the end of the URL. (Or, if there's already a ? in the URL, make it &usescheme=lynx.) That will force the single page to reload in the Lynx style without resetting your preferred site scheme, and it works on any site-styled page. (For non-site-styled pages, add ?style=light. Yeah, the fact that it's so confusing is one of the things we will be fixing up!)
As we approach the holiday season -- no matter what holiday you happen to celebrate -- it's time for a question: what do you want as a holiday gift from Dreamwidth this year?
That is to say: we're starting to think about our project plans for the first half of 2010 (oh God, remember when 2010 seemed like it was aeons away?), and while we've got a bunch of things on the list that we want to accomplish, I figured we'd also poll y'all. What things are you really looking forward to? What particular small annoyances do you really want fixed? What are you looking forward to that will really enhance your Dreamwidth experience?
(If you're looking for ideas to call out, you can look over past suggestions indw_suggestions, or browse the open bugs list.)
While I can't promise anything, I personally am going to be spending much of December hard at work on things that have come through the Suggestions queue -- trying to give as many holiday gifts as possible, of course -- and I know that a lot of our other developers are looking for projects that will make people happy -- so sound off in the comments.
Last week I gave some numbers on the progress we've made through our Suggestions process. Well, this weekend (while in the turkey coma, of course), I sat down to do some housekeeping on the tags indw_suggestions, and found that a number of posts had been mis-tagged. 680+ entries later -- yes, I went through every entry to update the tags properly and make sure everything was in the correct status -- things are now properly counted.
So, my numbers were wrong, but I'm happy to announce that they were wrong in the "under" direction instead of the "over". The number we've migrated from the suggestions process into Bugzilla was right -- 160 suggestions -- but the number implemented was under-counted; we've actually implemented 49 of them. This makes it a 30% implementation rate so far. The tags on the community have been cleared up so that you can now tell at a glance how many of your suggestions have been added to Bugzilla or to the site -- just look for the bugzilla: implemented for things that have been coded already, and the bugzilla: migrated tag for things that have been added to Bugzilla but not yet completed.
As always, you can search for past suggestions, submit your own suggestion, or read others' suggestions in thedw_suggestions community. We love hearing what you think.
This week's community promotions revolve around lifestyle communities -- fashion, food, and fun:
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
shoes is for, well, shoes! All kinds, all shapes, all sizes: this community brings you your daily dose of shoe images to drool over and discuss.
bakeitup: With holidays approaching, many people are starting to think about the holiday baking. (My girlfriend's mother, for instance, produces enough cookies in December to feed a small army. Or a small nation.) This community is for recipes, pictures, tips and tricks, so join and share the baked-goods love.
style_salon is for people to discuss their own personal style, along with sharing tips, tricks, and hints on how to create and build your style -- not just clothes or fashion, but all the little details and flourishes that make up the way you present yourself to the world, from interior decorating to designing your online haunts and beyond. If you're looking for tips on ways to express yourself without breaking the bank, or in search of help so that the next shopping trip won't be as much of nightmare, this may be the place for you.
thesims3: I personally can't keep the Sims installed on my computer if I ever want to get anything accomplished ever again, but this community is for those who have more strength of will than I do: a collection of everything and anything having to do with The Sims 3, the second-best timesuck known to humanity. (The best, of course, being the Civilization series. Or, okay, Zilch... and having loaded that page to confirm the link means I'm going to be toast for the rest of the day.)
I'm pleased to announce that I've been invited to the National Center for Women & Information Technology's annual conference, to speak (withdamned_colonial) in a session on women in open source. The conference will be held on May 18-20, on the Intel campus in Hillsboro, Oregon.
The attention that Dreamwidth has been getting in the Open Source world, in recognition of our success in building a high-quality, diverse team of passionate and skilled contributors, is one of the most awesome things about this project. I am still astounded by the kind of response we've had so far to this crazy dream of ours, and when I was looking for things to be thankful for this year, Dreamwidth -- and y'all -- were really high on the list.
*
And that brings this update -- and the month of November -- to a close! 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've got an idea to make the site better, you can make a suggestion; if you just want to come and hang out, join us in irc at irc.dwscoalition.org, channel #dw. (While the denizens of #dw do not bite, we have been known to gnaw gently.)
We'll see you next week for our next update, in which I hand the reins over to![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
mark for December.
This week brings us a miscellaney, or perhaps an assortment; one of these days I'll figure out the right word to use. I'd also like to use this opportunity and audience to announce that everybody should go out and buy a copy of Changing the World, the latest anthology of stories set in Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar universe, available tomorrow, as Yours Truly is the co-author of the second story in the book. (And if you order your copy through that link, I get Amazon referral credit as well as royalties, too!) It's my first appearance in print -- although not my first sale, which will be coming out in another few months -- and I'm ridiculously proud of it.
Behind the cut: development updates, messages from a few project teams, Dreamwidth-in-person, community promo, a few things we'd like your opinion on, and the handover to Mark for next month's updates.
1. Development
Our development efforts this week bring about a few things that I've been looking forward to for a while. The full tally can be found in this week's code tour, done by the fabulous
yvi, but there are two big additions that have been frequently-requested and that I'm really looking forward to having live:* "Admins only" security level. This adds a new option, by analogy with the 'private' security level, when posting in communities: community admins can use this security level, and it will only be visible to other community admins. No longer will you need to maintain a separate "admin community" for high-traffic or high-profile communities with multiple maintainers; a judicious combination of tags and admin-only security level will let you do all the administrative work to keep your community in good order all in one place.
* Icon keyword renaming. As everyone with a fondness for icons knows, if you rename an icon's keywords (maybe you've changed your naming scheme, or discovered a typo that's been there for months and you just realized) all previous uses of the icon revert to default, because the keyword has been changed. Well, thanks to
allen's hard work -- and I mean 'hard work'; this patch went through a ton of revision -- you will soon be able to pick whether or not you want to update old posts to use the new keywords, thus making sure that your old posts keep showing the right icon even though you've changed the icon's name.All of these enhancements, plus more (including fixes to tag editing in communities, accessibility-related changes to the alt text on user tags, bug fixes for the inbox to make the single-entry view work properly, and several new themes) will be available with the next code push, which will be announced in
dw_maintenance. 2. Development (Redux)
Two questions for you this week:
* Do folks find the weekly code tours interesting/informative/useful to y'all? We like doing them -- it's good for us to look back over things that we've accomplished -- but I wanted to check in and see if people find the posts useful and informative, or if there's anything else we should be adding in them.
* The Support Triumvirate suggested that we do a companion weekly post, of all new bugs/enhancement requests that were filed in our bug tracker that week, so people can see the sort of issues we have on our radar. I like the idea, although my impulse is to say that we should save the effort for other things, since it's possible to get Bugzilla to email you about all new tickets filed, but if it's something people would really be interested in, we could probably find someone to do it (or script something to make Bugzilla email a weekly report in as an email post). Would y'all be interested in that?
3. Antispam
The antispam team would like to thank everyone who's been deleting (and properly marking as spam) anonymous spam comments quickly. Through everyone's efforts, and the fact that our antispam team is really on the ball, it's sometimes a matter of minutes between when a spammer is brought to our attention and when we take steps to block them from continuing the spam, which is part of what keeps any given spam attack isolated to only a few journals.
96% of our spam reports are still invalid/not actually spam, but the remaining 4% are handled with alacrity. (I am amused, and slightly baffled, to report that this week's spam trend seems to be quoting Plato.)
4. Support
The Support team (all praise be to their devotion) would like me to remind people that if you find yourself unable to log in for any reason, and need to contact them, you can do so without logging into your Dreamwidth account first. Just hit up the Submit Support Request page and provide your name and email address.
Meanwhile, Support also would like to remind people that if you ever find a page that you can't load for some reason -- for instance, several of our pages don't function well in older browsers like Internet Explorer 6 -- you can choose the Lynx site scheme on the Display tab of the Account Settings page for your account. Lynx, or light mode, is a low-formatting site scheme that works well for screenreaders, mobile devices, and older browsers.
We have a lot of bugs open to improve the process of selecting your browsing preferences and making them stick -- for both the site-styled pages and journal-styled pages. In the meantime, though, if you ever find that you can't load a single page, there's a workaround: add ?usescheme=lynx to the end of the URL. (Or, if there's already a ? in the URL, make it &usescheme=lynx.) That will force the single page to reload in the Lynx style without resetting your preferred site scheme, and it works on any site-styled page. (For non-site-styled pages, add ?style=light. Yeah, the fact that it's so confusing is one of the things we will be fixing up!)
5. Holiday Gifts
As we approach the holiday season -- no matter what holiday you happen to celebrate -- it's time for a question: what do you want as a holiday gift from Dreamwidth this year?
That is to say: we're starting to think about our project plans for the first half of 2010 (oh God, remember when 2010 seemed like it was aeons away?), and while we've got a bunch of things on the list that we want to accomplish, I figured we'd also poll y'all. What things are you really looking forward to? What particular small annoyances do you really want fixed? What are you looking forward to that will really enhance your Dreamwidth experience?
(If you're looking for ideas to call out, you can look over past suggestions in
dw_suggestions, or browse the open bugs list.)While I can't promise anything, I personally am going to be spending much of December hard at work on things that have come through the Suggestions queue -- trying to give as many holiday gifts as possible, of course -- and I know that a lot of our other developers are looking for projects that will make people happy -- so sound off in the comments.
6. Suggestions
Last week I gave some numbers on the progress we've made through our Suggestions process. Well, this weekend (while in the turkey coma, of course), I sat down to do some housekeeping on the tags in
dw_suggestions, and found that a number of posts had been mis-tagged. 680+ entries later -- yes, I went through every entry to update the tags properly and make sure everything was in the correct status -- things are now properly counted.So, my numbers were wrong, but I'm happy to announce that they were wrong in the "under" direction instead of the "over". The number we've migrated from the suggestions process into Bugzilla was right -- 160 suggestions -- but the number implemented was under-counted; we've actually implemented 49 of them. This makes it a 30% implementation rate so far. The tags on the community have been cleared up so that you can now tell at a glance how many of your suggestions have been added to Bugzilla or to the site -- just look for the bugzilla: implemented for things that have been coded already, and the bugzilla: migrated tag for things that have been added to Bugzilla but not yet completed.
As always, you can search for past suggestions, submit your own suggestion, or read others' suggestions in the
dw_suggestions community. We love hearing what you think.7. Community Promos
This week's community promotions revolve around lifestyle communities -- fashion, food, and fun:
shoes is for, well, shoes! All kinds, all shapes, all sizes: this community brings you your daily dose of shoe images to drool over and discuss.bakeitup: With holidays approaching, many people are starting to think about the holiday baking. (My girlfriend's mother, for instance, produces enough cookies in December to feed a small army. Or a small nation.) This community is for recipes, pictures, tips and tricks, so join and share the baked-goods love.style_salon is for people to discuss their own personal style, along with sharing tips, tricks, and hints on how to create and build your style -- not just clothes or fashion, but all the little details and flourishes that make up the way you present yourself to the world, from interior decorating to designing your online haunts and beyond. If you're looking for tips on ways to express yourself without breaking the bank, or in search of help so that the next shopping trip won't be as much of nightmare, this may be the place for you.thesims3: I personally can't keep the Sims installed on my computer if I ever want to get anything accomplished ever again, but this community is for those who have more strength of will than I do: a collection of everything and anything having to do with The Sims 3, the second-best timesuck known to humanity. (The best, of course, being the Civilization series. Or, okay, Zilch... and having loaded that page to confirm the link means I'm going to be toast for the rest of the day.)8. Dreamwidth in Person
I'm pleased to announce that I've been invited to the National Center for Women & Information Technology's annual conference, to speak (with
damned_colonial) in a session on women in open source. The conference will be held on May 18-20, on the Intel campus in Hillsboro, Oregon. The attention that Dreamwidth has been getting in the Open Source world, in recognition of our success in building a high-quality, diverse team of passionate and skilled contributors, is one of the most awesome things about this project. I am still astounded by the kind of response we've had so far to this crazy dream of ours, and when I was looking for things to be thankful for this year, Dreamwidth -- and y'all -- were really high on the list.
*
And that brings this update -- and the month of November -- to a close! 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've got an idea to make the site better, you can make a suggestion; if you just want to come and hang out, join us in irc at irc.dwscoalition.org, channel #dw. (While the denizens of #dw do not bite, we have been known to gnaw gently.)
We'll see you next week for our next update, in which I hand the reins over to
mark for December.
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