Weekly Update: 21 December 2009

[mark]

Happy Holidays!

Dreamwidth is humming along, and this week's update promises to be short and to the point. I'm currently out of town in North Dakota visiting my family (hello, Mom!) and we're relaxing in the living room about to watch the video of my wedding which we just got recently... ah, holidays!

1. Spam Update

Our anti-spam team has an update for you this week. There were 79 reports of spam, of which 78 were actually valid spams. We've taken care of banning the IP addresses and account that was spamming us, and we're working to build better tools (and analyze LJ's latest anti-spam tools) to see if we can automate this some.

Thank you to all of you that report spam when you see it! That is the best way for us to be able to identify where spam is coming from and get rid of it.

2. Gradation Vertical

If you don't know what I'm talking about, last code push we released a new site scheme -- a different way of browsing the Dreamwidth site. If you haven't seen it yet, you can get a look at it here:

http://www.dreamwidth.org/?usescheme=gradation-vertical-local

It's a dark scheme designed to provide an alternative to the bright schemes we have right now. If you want to use this scheme yourself, you can set that in your Manage Account page, Display tab:

http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=display

Anyway, this is a new site scheme and there are still some bits that aren't quite right yet. If you like it and would like to help us improve it, please see this post by foxfirefey:

http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/33203.html

Thanks for helping out!

3. Development

Not much to say for development this week. What with myself and most other people being out or busy for the end of December, it's going to be pretty slow around here as far as code development goes.

For this week we will skip the code and bug tours, and instead I will personally thank all of the people who make this possible. Thank you!

4. Wrap-up

Well, that's the end of this short update. Happy Holidays if you celebrate something, and if not, I hope you enjoy your week!

Comments

[iamshadow]

I think this theme is less about mood and more about accessibility. As someone with sensory sensitivity, this theme is a welcome relief. Pages with heavy concentrations of white or bright colours give me headaches and make me squint. This can make composing a blog post something that can take hours, because I have to give my eyes a break every minute or so and look at something else. I could easily make my journal theme dark, but the 'post' page was always that bright, stark white, and even my Irlen filter couldn't dilute that much. Hopefully, this basic light on black theme will make it easier for me and others like me.

[tenkuu]

True, but I couldn't stand to navigate a black page for very long. I prefer pages with lighter backgrounds myself. Looking at white text on a black page for very long, for me, is a little like staring at a bright light in near darkness, it eventually gets to straining the eyes. I understand where you're coming from though.

[niqaeli]

This is me, too; after my last migraine, I started switching everything over to dark backgrounds to reduce the amount of light I'm forcing on myself. And I've noticed a huge difference in the strain on my eyes since, so it's definitely been worth it. (Even if it has been super-frustrating coming to realise how little design philosophy takes folks with light sensitivity into account.)

So, anyway, I wanted to point you at these 'Zap' bookmarklets. They're javascript bookmarklets that let you zap irritations away; it's not persistent through reloads and what have you, but being able to zap a too-bright page to something more bearable is still really handy. I modified the zap colours bookmarklet to give me green text on black background with white links.

It's not a perfect solution but I've found it to be useful. :)

ETA: Oh, tarnation. I tried to include my modified version for your reference, but it looks like the code-stripper doesn't like javascript. (Which is fair enough, I suppose!) Well, I can email/PM it to you, if you are interested.

[zvi]

On LJ, you could usually put code in a <textarea> without it getting stripped. I know that it works on DW for entries, I haven't tried comments.

[moonstruckangel]

"I could easily make my journal theme dark, but the 'post' page was always that bright, stark white"

Exactly! Before I type an entry post on livejournal,I always have to open up Windowblinds and choose a dark desktop theme that will change the text area black or a dark color with gray/lighter colored font. As I'm writing this comment the background of the text area is black with gray text,even so the entire light background against the dark text area strains my eyes. I'm just glad we now have an entire dark theme,it's the best thing ever. :)