Entry tags:
Progress Report: 23 March 2009
My apologies for the late update; I was away this weekend, and just got back a few hours ago. Let me tell you, it's awesome to come back from a weekend that was mostly internet-free to find so many cool things had happened in my absence. I know I keep saying this over and over again, and you're probably all tired of hearing it by now, but we really do have the most amazing team in the world working on this project, and both Mark and I remain pleased, thankful, and more than a little bit stunned (in the good way!) by the level of commitment, professionalism, and enthusiasm exhibited by our community and its members.
Every time we stop and take a good look around this project, how far we've come, and what we've built already, it becomes clear yet again that we have had the very great good fortune here to have assembled and nurtured one of the most kickass teams either of us has ever had the pleasure of working with. I don't really have words to explain how incredible it is to take a look around and realize that a project that started as a "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we someday did..." conversation almost exactly a year ago has turned into something that's bigger and better than anything we could have imagined. (And both Mark and I have pretty good imaginations.)
I joke a lot that the end result of any conversation that starts out with someone coming to us and saying "hey, it'd be cool if someday you guys did ..." is, about half the time, the person who brought that thing up being put in charge of getting it done -- ask![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rho sometime about the number of conversations we've had that end with her asking me how I talked her into taking over our entire project documentation -- but like all good jokes, there's a grain of truth in it. Dreamwidth, as a project, is built around the concept of empowering people who are passionate about their particular goals: nearly every project team running right now is headed up by someone who saw a need and stepped up to fill it.
We think that's incredible. (In fact, there aren't adequate superlatives for how incredible we think it is.) And I want to take a minute right now to reiterate our appreciation for everyone who's contributed to the project so far -- by contributing code, documentation, wished-for features, graphics work, design work, opinions on how the service should run, feedback on our policies (and pointing out our mistakes!), bug reports, and everything all the way on down to telling your friends and contacts about what Dreamwidth is and why you care about it.
Thank you. Your energy and enthusiasm makes it incredibly easy to keep up our own energy and enthusiasm for the project, and it makes our roles as curators and navigators easier, more pleasant, and more fun.
1. CODE PROGRESS (BY THE NUMBERS)
We start off this week's update with our numbers! Last week we committed 40 patches to the codebase, which resolved 21 bugs ranging from minor fixes to massive improvements. Big things we did this week include updates to the FAQ system bypauamma, fixes to the content import system by ![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
mark, a new "Create Account" workflow by janinedog, work on alt-text support for userpics by jadelennox, usability improvements to the image-placeholder system by ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
isabeau, the beginnings of the crossposting system by allen, and -- the big one -- support for our new style system improvements, more about which in a bit.
Last week I mentioned that we'd welcomed several new members of our development community. I'm happy to announce that this week, we accepted a first patch fromowl, who comes to us by way of Java experience but who is totally new to Perl. We're always incredibly happy -- and a little bit humbled -- to know that people care enough about contributing that they're willing to learn a whole new language just to help us out. (And if you too are interested, we're willing to teach! There's almost always someone around in irc willing to help you get started.)
On the other end of the experience scale, meanwhile, we welcomejaninedog as a new committer to our source tree. (A committer is a person who looks over patches provided by other people and does the necessary magic to have that code become part of the code that everyone can use.) We're thrilled to have Janine's experience on the job.
We're down to 33 open-beta-blocking items, with 228 open items (including, but not limited to, the open-beta blocking ones) and 316 resolved items. And at some point this week, I should probably do something about the 15 of 'em assigned to me. (Urp.)
For those of you who are more visually oriented, meanwhile,exor674 did something interesting tonight: a graph of how many lines of code exist in the dw-free repository (our main repository for nearly all of our code). It's not a perfect visualization, since a). lines of code is not the best metric of software development in the world and b). we're still fumbling around with how to present our metrics in a meaningful fashion, but it is still pretty interesting:
Lines of Code over time
2. READY FOR OUR CLOSEUP
Our biggest and most exciting news this week is the commit-and-release of core2, our new style system backend. This has been the result of an incredible amount of work done byafuna, aveleh, av8rmike, draigwen, jadelennox, liv, and rich, with help from jproulx and nova.
Our overall goal with the style system project is to take S2, the custom language that Brad and LJ developed to control the look and feel of your journal, and make it easier to understand and control. The code we inherited when we forked from LJ is powerful, but not very easy for the average user to understand, which leads to a tremendous amount of frustration when you try to style your journal. The styles team is working to standardize all of the options available in the customization wizard (so that every style can do the same things), make it easier to control your journal's look using CSS (cascading style sheets) so people can more readily share custom layouts, and fix up the documentation so that people who want to really dig under the hood and write their own styles from scratch will have an easier time of it.
It's an incredibly involved project (and the reason why journals on Dreamwidth are currently unstyled), and the commit-and-release of core2 is the first major step. The team is working now to test the functionality available in core2, and as soon as they've verified that nothing's horribly broken, they'll start turning their attention to getting the available styles (both the ones we inherited from LJ and the ones that were licensed specifically to Dreamwidth) ported over to using the new core.
If you're interested in following along with this project, you can follow the dw_styles community:
![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_styles
3. SYSADMIN LOVE
As we get closer to open beta, we're starting to work on our production-hardware buildout -- which necessitates coming up with ways to manage the production hardware, making it easy for our sysadmins (right now just Mark, but down the line we'll have others) to deploy, configure, and support new hardware as fast as possible. This, along with the fact that we're going to be hosted with Slicehost until we have a better idea of what kind of hardware we need, is what will let us react quickly to site load and resolve issues as they come up.
We're committed to publicly releasing not only the Dreamwidth server code, but also the suite of tools we develop to support the site -- thus making it even easier for someone who wants to run an instance of the Dreamwidth code as a site for themselves and a few friends or as a small business. (Examples of this include our efforts to improve the installation process, the fact that we're including our payment system as part of our Open Sourced code, and the fact that all of our end-user documentation such as our FAQs are explicitly Creative Commons-licensed.)
As part of this, this week we checked in our Puppet config files. Puppet is the configuration management system we'll be using to keep our production servers set up correctly. Thanks toxenacryst for the help in writing and maintaining the config files!
You can see our operations tools in our brand-new Mercurial repository:
dw-ops
4. DW IN THE WILD
I spent this weekend at Lunacon, a science-fiction convention held in upstate New York, and I'm pleased to announce that I overheard a number of people mentioning Dreamwidth favorably without even knowing I was there or that I was listening -- and even more people saying "Oh, yes, I heard about that!" when I mentioned what I was working on. I had a number of great conversations about the project and the energy behind it, but I credit everyone's advocacy work as the reason that I wasn't starting from zero. Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to write about or talk about the Dreamwidth project so far!
Mark and I have also been invited to Azkatraz, a Harry Potter-specific convention held in San Francisco in July, to speak about the process of creating Dreamwidth. The tentative title of our panel is "Dreamwidth Studios: A Next Generation of Online Community". If you're headed to the con, or if you live in or are going to be in the Bay Area that weekend, we'll probably also arrange some sort of Dreamwidth dinner-and-or-pub-crawl for people to meet up.
Meanwhile, if you run a conference or convention (whether fan-related, Open Source-related, or something else entirely) and are interested in having us come run a panel, or if you know of a particular conference or convention that we should be speaking at, submitting a proposal to, or submitting a paper for, please do let us know. We like talking to people. We particularly like talking to people about what we're doing here, because we think it's just that awesome.
We also plan to have Dreamwidth "convention packages" in the future, where people who will be attending or putting on conventions or conferences can write to us and we'll ship them Dreamwidth promotional materials to hand out to con attendees. More information on this will be forthcoming after open beta launch.
5. IT'S FOR A GOOD CAUSE
And speaking of conventions, we are happy to announce our participation in the Fight Derailing project, an effort to help increase the representation of people of color in science fiction and fantasy. Though we're not a fandom-specific service, fandom (and particularly science fiction and fantasy fandom, which was my first fannish home) is a culture near and dear to my heart, and I'm delighted to be able to participate (even in such a minor way) in a program to help increase the inclusiveness of that culture.
As part of an effort to create a scholarship fund to help assist fans of color to attend Wiscon, a major science fiction and fantasy convention designed to be a welcoming and inclusive space, Dreamwidth is auctioning off a Seed Account (permanent account) as part of the fundraiser. If you're interested in the auction (bidding has already exceeded our wildest dreams!), it's posted here:
Offer: Dreamwidth Studios Seed (permanent) Account
We're excited about participating in this fundraiser because we think that it fits well with our goals of inclusiveness and respect. We think it's important to work towards increasing the inclusiveness not only in our own ranks, but in the various communities we as individuals are part of and the communities whose members have worked so hard to help make Dreamwidth a success. While we as a company can't necessarily participate in or contribute to every worthy cause, if you know of something that dovetails nicely with our principles, please do let us know.
6. POPULATING OUR NEW HOME
As we get closer and closer to our open beta launch, we're starting to think about community outreach -- programs to contact specific communities and major movers-and-shakers to let them know of Dreamwidth's existence and why it's so awesome. We're particularly interested in getting the word out among the Open Source community and among major loci of creative people -- writers, artists, musicians, publishers, crafters, artisans, and other makers-of-things.
Mark and I have said that our goal, with Dreamwidth, is to make a service for people who make things: no matter what kind of creative work is your particular passion (from fiction writing to art to essays to crafts to producing a record and chronicle of your life), we want to give you the tools that will make it easy for you to create, share your creations, and find things that others have made.
We're well on our way (thanks to all of the amazing energy from our team of contributors) to building one of the more awesome sites out there, but it's time for you to tell us who we should be reaching out to. If you can think of a particular community that you think would feel at home on Dreamwidth, email me and Mark and let us know.
In the coming weeks, meanwhile, we'll be extending Dreamwidth invites to those of you who have been contributing and following along with the project, as we get closer and closer to being ready for prime time. Stay tuned for more information.
7. SPREAD THE LOVE
Meanwhile, if you're looking for some hints about how to spread the word effectively, our Guide to Dreamwidth Advocacy is located on the Wiki:
Dreamwidth Advocacy
If you make a post, add it to our Why Dreamwidth? link roundup:
Why Dreamwidth?
Every time someone makes a post about Dreamwidth, I see people who hadn't otherwise heard of the project asking questions and getting interested, so even if you think all of your friends already know about Dreamwidth, there's a good chance that at least someone in your audience isn't aware of us yet. Remember, word of mouth is our most valuable and important advertising, and will be the second most critical part of building a service that can be a sustainable and stable home.
(The most critical part of building a service that can be a sustainable and stable home, of course, is going to be offering a kickass product. We like to think we're well on our way to that goal, too.)
You can find icons and banners -- including a number of newly-created badges and icons, all of which are awesome -- on the Wiki:
Dreamwidth Icons
(Be sure to click through on the graphics, since the Wiki software resizes them in certain circumstances, leaving them a bit fuzzy-looking.)
8. TALK TO US!
For brainstorming, questions, and discussion, you can join the dw-discuss mailing list.
For once-daily (more or less) updates on what-we-did-today, check out our Dreamwidth Twitter account.
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
As we get closer and closer to open beta launch, we're starting to build our "official Dreamwidth communities" list, as we figure out what the best balance is between making sure people can subscribe to only the content they're interested in and making sure that we don't have umpty gajillion official communities people need to follow to get the whole picture. Look for us to finalize that list soon, and once we do so, we'll start mirroring announcements there and appointing people as our newsletter-scribes (in other words, the people who listen to us babble for half an hour about what should go into an update and then go away and turn that babbling into actual useful, coherent entries).
Questions? Comments? Things we really should know? Email Mark and me at the_bosses@dwscoalition.org, or comment here using your OpenID account.
We'll see you next week, at which point I will no doubt once again be wondering who hit the fast-forward button.
Every time we stop and take a good look around this project, how far we've come, and what we've built already, it becomes clear yet again that we have had the very great good fortune here to have assembled and nurtured one of the most kickass teams either of us has ever had the pleasure of working with. I don't really have words to explain how incredible it is to take a look around and realize that a project that started as a "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we someday did..." conversation almost exactly a year ago has turned into something that's bigger and better than anything we could have imagined. (And both Mark and I have pretty good imaginations.)
I joke a lot that the end result of any conversation that starts out with someone coming to us and saying "hey, it'd be cool if someday you guys did ..." is, about half the time, the person who brought that thing up being put in charge of getting it done -- ask
rho sometime about the number of conversations we've had that end with her asking me how I talked her into taking over our entire project documentation -- but like all good jokes, there's a grain of truth in it. Dreamwidth, as a project, is built around the concept of empowering people who are passionate about their particular goals: nearly every project team running right now is headed up by someone who saw a need and stepped up to fill it. We think that's incredible. (In fact, there aren't adequate superlatives for how incredible we think it is.) And I want to take a minute right now to reiterate our appreciation for everyone who's contributed to the project so far -- by contributing code, documentation, wished-for features, graphics work, design work, opinions on how the service should run, feedback on our policies (and pointing out our mistakes!), bug reports, and everything all the way on down to telling your friends and contacts about what Dreamwidth is and why you care about it.
Thank you. Your energy and enthusiasm makes it incredibly easy to keep up our own energy and enthusiasm for the project, and it makes our roles as curators and navigators easier, more pleasant, and more fun.
1. CODE PROGRESS (BY THE NUMBERS)
We start off this week's update with our numbers! Last week we committed 40 patches to the codebase, which resolved 21 bugs ranging from minor fixes to massive improvements. Big things we did this week include updates to the FAQ system by
pauamma, fixes to the content import system by mark, a new "Create Account" workflow by janinedog, work on alt-text support for userpics by jadelennox, usability improvements to the image-placeholder system by isabeau, the beginnings of the crossposting system by allen, and -- the big one -- support for our new style system improvements, more about which in a bit.Last week I mentioned that we'd welcomed several new members of our development community. I'm happy to announce that this week, we accepted a first patch from
owl, who comes to us by way of Java experience but who is totally new to Perl. We're always incredibly happy -- and a little bit humbled -- to know that people care enough about contributing that they're willing to learn a whole new language just to help us out. (And if you too are interested, we're willing to teach! There's almost always someone around in irc willing to help you get started.)On the other end of the experience scale, meanwhile, we welcome
janinedog as a new committer to our source tree. (A committer is a person who looks over patches provided by other people and does the necessary magic to have that code become part of the code that everyone can use.) We're thrilled to have Janine's experience on the job.We're down to 33 open-beta-blocking items, with 228 open items (including, but not limited to, the open-beta blocking ones) and 316 resolved items. And at some point this week, I should probably do something about the 15 of 'em assigned to me. (Urp.)
For those of you who are more visually oriented, meanwhile,
exor674 did something interesting tonight: a graph of how many lines of code exist in the dw-free repository (our main repository for nearly all of our code). It's not a perfect visualization, since a). lines of code is not the best metric of software development in the world and b). we're still fumbling around with how to present our metrics in a meaningful fashion, but it is still pretty interesting:Lines of Code over time
2. READY FOR OUR CLOSEUP
Our biggest and most exciting news this week is the commit-and-release of core2, our new style system backend. This has been the result of an incredible amount of work done by
afuna, aveleh, av8rmike, draigwen, jadelennox, liv, and rich, with help from jproulx and nova. Our overall goal with the style system project is to take S2, the custom language that Brad and LJ developed to control the look and feel of your journal, and make it easier to understand and control. The code we inherited when we forked from LJ is powerful, but not very easy for the average user to understand, which leads to a tremendous amount of frustration when you try to style your journal. The styles team is working to standardize all of the options available in the customization wizard (so that every style can do the same things), make it easier to control your journal's look using CSS (cascading style sheets) so people can more readily share custom layouts, and fix up the documentation so that people who want to really dig under the hood and write their own styles from scratch will have an easier time of it.
It's an incredibly involved project (and the reason why journals on Dreamwidth are currently unstyled), and the commit-and-release of core2 is the first major step. The team is working now to test the functionality available in core2, and as soon as they've verified that nothing's horribly broken, they'll start turning their attention to getting the available styles (both the ones we inherited from LJ and the ones that were licensed specifically to Dreamwidth) ported over to using the new core.
If you're interested in following along with this project, you can follow the dw_styles community:
dw_styles3. SYSADMIN LOVE
As we get closer to open beta, we're starting to work on our production-hardware buildout -- which necessitates coming up with ways to manage the production hardware, making it easy for our sysadmins (right now just Mark, but down the line we'll have others) to deploy, configure, and support new hardware as fast as possible. This, along with the fact that we're going to be hosted with Slicehost until we have a better idea of what kind of hardware we need, is what will let us react quickly to site load and resolve issues as they come up.
We're committed to publicly releasing not only the Dreamwidth server code, but also the suite of tools we develop to support the site -- thus making it even easier for someone who wants to run an instance of the Dreamwidth code as a site for themselves and a few friends or as a small business. (Examples of this include our efforts to improve the installation process, the fact that we're including our payment system as part of our Open Sourced code, and the fact that all of our end-user documentation such as our FAQs are explicitly Creative Commons-licensed.)
As part of this, this week we checked in our Puppet config files. Puppet is the configuration management system we'll be using to keep our production servers set up correctly. Thanks to
xenacryst for the help in writing and maintaining the config files!You can see our operations tools in our brand-new Mercurial repository:
dw-ops
4. DW IN THE WILD
I spent this weekend at Lunacon, a science-fiction convention held in upstate New York, and I'm pleased to announce that I overheard a number of people mentioning Dreamwidth favorably without even knowing I was there or that I was listening -- and even more people saying "Oh, yes, I heard about that!" when I mentioned what I was working on. I had a number of great conversations about the project and the energy behind it, but I credit everyone's advocacy work as the reason that I wasn't starting from zero. Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to write about or talk about the Dreamwidth project so far!
Mark and I have also been invited to Azkatraz, a Harry Potter-specific convention held in San Francisco in July, to speak about the process of creating Dreamwidth. The tentative title of our panel is "Dreamwidth Studios: A Next Generation of Online Community". If you're headed to the con, or if you live in or are going to be in the Bay Area that weekend, we'll probably also arrange some sort of Dreamwidth dinner-and-or-pub-crawl for people to meet up.
Meanwhile, if you run a conference or convention (whether fan-related, Open Source-related, or something else entirely) and are interested in having us come run a panel, or if you know of a particular conference or convention that we should be speaking at, submitting a proposal to, or submitting a paper for, please do let us know. We like talking to people. We particularly like talking to people about what we're doing here, because we think it's just that awesome.
We also plan to have Dreamwidth "convention packages" in the future, where people who will be attending or putting on conventions or conferences can write to us and we'll ship them Dreamwidth promotional materials to hand out to con attendees. More information on this will be forthcoming after open beta launch.
5. IT'S FOR A GOOD CAUSE
And speaking of conventions, we are happy to announce our participation in the Fight Derailing project, an effort to help increase the representation of people of color in science fiction and fantasy. Though we're not a fandom-specific service, fandom (and particularly science fiction and fantasy fandom, which was my first fannish home) is a culture near and dear to my heart, and I'm delighted to be able to participate (even in such a minor way) in a program to help increase the inclusiveness of that culture.
As part of an effort to create a scholarship fund to help assist fans of color to attend Wiscon, a major science fiction and fantasy convention designed to be a welcoming and inclusive space, Dreamwidth is auctioning off a Seed Account (permanent account) as part of the fundraiser. If you're interested in the auction (bidding has already exceeded our wildest dreams!), it's posted here:
Offer: Dreamwidth Studios Seed (permanent) Account
We're excited about participating in this fundraiser because we think that it fits well with our goals of inclusiveness and respect. We think it's important to work towards increasing the inclusiveness not only in our own ranks, but in the various communities we as individuals are part of and the communities whose members have worked so hard to help make Dreamwidth a success. While we as a company can't necessarily participate in or contribute to every worthy cause, if you know of something that dovetails nicely with our principles, please do let us know.
6. POPULATING OUR NEW HOME
As we get closer and closer to our open beta launch, we're starting to think about community outreach -- programs to contact specific communities and major movers-and-shakers to let them know of Dreamwidth's existence and why it's so awesome. We're particularly interested in getting the word out among the Open Source community and among major loci of creative people -- writers, artists, musicians, publishers, crafters, artisans, and other makers-of-things.
Mark and I have said that our goal, with Dreamwidth, is to make a service for people who make things: no matter what kind of creative work is your particular passion (from fiction writing to art to essays to crafts to producing a record and chronicle of your life), we want to give you the tools that will make it easy for you to create, share your creations, and find things that others have made.
We're well on our way (thanks to all of the amazing energy from our team of contributors) to building one of the more awesome sites out there, but it's time for you to tell us who we should be reaching out to. If you can think of a particular community that you think would feel at home on Dreamwidth, email me and Mark and let us know.
In the coming weeks, meanwhile, we'll be extending Dreamwidth invites to those of you who have been contributing and following along with the project, as we get closer and closer to being ready for prime time. Stay tuned for more information.
7. SPREAD THE LOVE
Meanwhile, if you're looking for some hints about how to spread the word effectively, our Guide to Dreamwidth Advocacy is located on the Wiki:
Dreamwidth Advocacy
If you make a post, add it to our Why Dreamwidth? link roundup:
Why Dreamwidth?
Every time someone makes a post about Dreamwidth, I see people who hadn't otherwise heard of the project asking questions and getting interested, so even if you think all of your friends already know about Dreamwidth, there's a good chance that at least someone in your audience isn't aware of us yet. Remember, word of mouth is our most valuable and important advertising, and will be the second most critical part of building a service that can be a sustainable and stable home.
(The most critical part of building a service that can be a sustainable and stable home, of course, is going to be offering a kickass product. We like to think we're well on our way to that goal, too.)
You can find icons and banners -- including a number of newly-created badges and icons, all of which are awesome -- on the Wiki:
Dreamwidth Icons
(Be sure to click through on the graphics, since the Wiki software resizes them in certain circumstances, leaving them a bit fuzzy-looking.)
8. TALK TO US!
For brainstorming, questions, and discussion, you can join the dw-discuss mailing list.
For once-daily (more or less) updates on what-we-did-today, check out our Dreamwidth Twitter account.
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
As we get closer and closer to open beta launch, we're starting to build our "official Dreamwidth communities" list, as we figure out what the best balance is between making sure people can subscribe to only the content they're interested in and making sure that we don't have umpty gajillion official communities people need to follow to get the whole picture. Look for us to finalize that list soon, and once we do so, we'll start mirroring announcements there and appointing people as our newsletter-scribes (in other words, the people who listen to us babble for half an hour about what should go into an update and then go away and turn that babbling into actual useful, coherent entries).
Questions? Comments? Things we really should know? Email Mark and me at the_bosses@dwscoalition.org, or comment here using your OpenID account.
We'll see you next week, at which point I will no doubt once again be wondering who hit the fast-forward button.