Weekly Update: 8 March

[denise]

I think there's a problem with my calendar; it keeps getting stuck back on Monday. I'm fairly certain it was just Monday yesterday ...

Still, temporal distortion aside, onwards to the weekly update.

1. Development

Dev work this week concentrated on the styles end of things, with new themes, new layouts (including EasyRead, a one-column layout built to accomodate large text and both high and low-contrast colors) and updates to the S2 core backend. That wasn't all, though! This week also included some improvements to the process of leaving a deleted community, upgrades to how screened comments are shown on the site scheme once comments collapse, and a fix to the multiple icon uploader for the Internet Explorer browser, among other things.

This week's code tour explains it all. (And thanks to jd for his first (code)tour of duty!)

2. Anniversary Parties

The one-year anniversary of our open beta is fast approaching, and while we haven't sorted out exactly what we're going to be doing 'officially', jumpuphigh has created a community that will let people plan DW-related parties: dw_meetups. Go forth and celebrate!

3. Invites

As many people noticed, we released a new batch of invite codes into the wild this week, sent this time to people who had used up all their available invites. Enjoy inviting your friends!

Meanwhile, it's been a while since we've mentioned it, but: If you need a larger bunch of invites, to move over a community or start a RP, just contact us by opening a Support request in the Account Payments department. Let us know how many you need and why, and we'll be happy to take care of it.

4. Coming Soon

We've got some major things coming soon! In addition to cross-site reading, which Mark is still working on, we've also got:

* Renames! Thanks to the tireless efforts of afuna, soon you'll be able to buy and use rename tokens to change your username. (We had to reimplement the functionality, because LJ's version of the code isn't open source.) Look for more information about this new feature soon.

* Updates to the Latest Things page: mark had an awesome day today and put together a great new feature that will be live with the next code push. The Latest page will track the most popular tags used on the site, and provide a list of the 100 most popular (and links to see the posts tagged with those tags).

And, of course, the big one:

5. Payments

Our application with our chosen provider has been approved, and we hope to be able to once more accept credit card payments, very soon. We are (for what we hope are obvious reasons) not going to be publicising the name of our new provider, since their features allow us to process the payment entirely on our end.

In order to comply with their requirements, we'll be changing around the way "paid accounts" are handled a bit -- we'll get into that more once we do it. But, as part of that change, we'll also be getting something that people have been asking for for a while: payment credits, which can be used for extra services on your own account or gifted to someone else's account. Look for more information coming soon.

And, until we're able to get our new processor implemented, we're still accepting checks and money orders in USD through our shop, and if you have a paid account that's about to expire and you can't use check or money order for any reason, contact us at accounts@dreamwidth.org or by opening a Support request in the Account Payments department. A special thank-you goes to everyone who's braved the Outside in order to send us a check or money order in the past week -- we really appreciate your effort. (And the notecards and words of encouragement are a great pick-me-up, too!)

6. Communities

Mark and I have been hard at work on a lot of things, but we've taken the time to create some community spaces, too. Some self-promotion:

fucking_meds: For complaining about your medication (of all types): side effects, reactions, drugs that don't do what they say they do on the label, and all kinds of general griping.

the_2nd: Political discussion with a conservative/libertarian slant, for all of you who feel outnumbered!

(No points for guessing which of us moderates which community.)

In non-us-started communities, there's also actyourwage, a finances and frugal-living community based on getting out of debt and achieving your financial goals, and homeeconomics101, for figuring out what the heck you're supposed to do with that broccoli/scrub brush/laundry/vaccuum anyway. And, if you're looking for something else, dw_community_promo has a list of communities you might find interesting.

7. Counting Down ...

We're counting down the weeks until afuna can start in on Dreamwidth full-time! Her first task will be implementing draft/scheduled posts, which carries with it a change to both the Update and Edit Journal pages in order to make those new features possible (and make them make sense!)

Mark talked about the update page redesign in his February 16th update (item #6), which also explains the process we'll be undergoing to make sure the end result works for everybody (or at least doesn't actively annoy the crap out of you). Afuna's going to be the one who implements the working mockup for us, at which point I'll be talking about what's changing, why it's changing, and how each of the changes will work better with the new features.

(And, since a lot of people have asked: we're going to be moving from the 'scroll' metaphor for your journal to the bookcase/lego-block model: your journal will be the thing that holds all the different contents (entries), which you'll be able to snap out, rearrange, move around, and otherwise play with. The biggest thing I'm excited about with this is getting an Edit Journal page that's useful.)

*

Now that I've been writing this update for hours and hours, that's it for us for another week! 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.

We'll see you next week for our next update.

Comments

[angelikitten]

Here's hoping that the update page will work okay on my phone - it's the only internet access I have!

[denise]

Fear not, we will be running it past y'all multiple times before making the switch, so if it doesn't work on your phone, just holler at us until we make it :)

[finch]

Actually, if you could throw together an alternate mobile version, that would be amazing...

[denise]

It's something I've wanted to do for a while, but it's a huge project and we haven't had anybody really step up to spearhead the project, and I personally don't have any kind of phone that would even be able to load the site (my phone does not even have internet access; it was state-of-the-art when I got it in like 2003...)

I'm hoping that somebody will come along who really cares about mobile browsing, since I do agree that it is something we should work towards. The problem is that there are just so many platforms out there ...

[quivo]

Honestly, I'd be happy with just a slight expansion of the dreamwidth.org/mobile featureset. I.e. display posts on your reading list as well as the titles, and link heavily into the Lynx site scheme, since that displays well on pretty much everything. I also have a G1 lying around that I'd be willing to donate to the effort for testing purposes.

[ursamajor]

I don't know that I have enough technical expertise to lead the project, but now that using my phone for internet access is such a key part of how I interact with the webworld, you can count me in as an eager volunteer for testing and possibly interface mocking up.

(And now REALLY I run to work!)

[exor674]

Actually, an interesting idea I have -- so it'd be *trivial* since converting pages over to the new tempting system separates the logic and the display -- to have two or three different templates, one for desktop browsers, one for the "desktop-class" mobile browsers if needed (Mobile WebKit is like, love), and one simple page for the rest of the mobile browsers.

[alierak]

Occasionally, a typo transcends mere misspelling and yields a new word or turn of phrase with meaning all its own. Template Toolkit, I now dub thee a "tempting system", and may the users succumb!

:)

[gchick]

Ooh, and so it is!

[azurelunatic]

One good thing about mobile browsing is that it shares a good amount of its needs with the people who are using screenreaders and text-only browsers. Those are sure to be also taken into consideration. I'm even less of a developer than Denise is, but I feel it very likely that if there has to be a separate screenreader/text-browser -safe version of the page, then it should not cause a mobile device (many/any) problems.

[angelikitten]

\o/! Nikita, my phone, is very pleased to hear this :)