Weekly Update: 23 June

[denise]

Hello, Dreamwidth! This week, in the continuing saga of My Cat Does Wacky Things, I wish to inform you that he is standing next to me and lecturing me at the top of his little kitty lungs for having abandoned him for the weekend. (This is less charming in the middle of the night, really.)

Congratulations this week go to chemicallace, one of our support team leaders, who got married this past weekend! (This and my absence from the apartment are unconnected.) She's on her honeymoon in the Maldives right now. I am deeply jealous.

And now, on with the update, in which I once again prove that Wednesday is the new Monday.

1. Development

This week's code tour is courtesy of azurelunatic. Our Clean Up The Little Stuff hackathon is going full steam ahead -- we've resolved 124 bugs so far this month, including one that was in the single digits. (It always makes me grin when we do that.)

Welcome this week goes to maiden and sinaienantia contributing images, and catness for a first patch. (New contributor! Woo!)

2. Why We Are Awesome

For those of you who are looking for arguments to convince your friends why life over here is shiny, angelikitten has a poll on why Dreamwidth is awesome. (My favorite answer: "Because my daughter made it." Hi, Mom.)

I mention this not just to toot our own horns (or to embarrass angelikitten), but because lately I've been trying to work on sketching out some of our on-site marketing material (which is a fancy, businessy way of saying "the things that make people want to create an account once they check out the site"). So, this week's "question I ask all of you so that my inbox falls over with comment replies" is, what would you say to a new user are the reasons to use Dreamwidth instead of (or in addition to) another blogging/journaling platform? Looking for your top five persuasive reasons in comments.

3. Styles

It's been a while since we've mentioned this, so: dreamscapes needs you! This is the comm where people post layouts that they're offering up as potential site-selectable styles. You don't need to be a S2 wizard or a CSS guru to help out, either: there are plenty of layouts that just need testing in as many browsers, resolutions, and text sizes as possible. Check out the needs testing tag. Meanwhile, for those who are S2 gurus, the unclaimed tag are the ones that need to be turned into committable patches.

And, if you're looking to get into style creation, but have been daunted at the complexity, the styles documentation project, led by foxfirefey, has been rolling merrily along. Check out the docs as they grow, and contribute if you're inspired. (Even -- especially -- if your contribution is to explain the bits that confuse you.)

4. Writer's Block

This week's "question that crosses my mind while I'm doing something else entirely" poll in dw_biz is about Writer's Block, the homepage question-of-the-day module on LiveJournal. We inherited the code that runs it from LJ, but never set it up or started using it over here, so I thought I'd see if people were interested in the feature or if we should yank it out in the name of code cleanup. Right now, opinions are strongly in favor of "yank it out", so if you think your DW experience is horribly lacking because we don't do it, head on over and make your argument before the next time I start itching to take a machete to the code. (It's surprisingly soothing to rip out unwanted code!)

5. Maintenance

Last week, we had brief downtime due to the physical failure of the network card on the server hosting our master database. mark wins Sysadmin of the Year award for pulling over and fixing the problem from the side of the road. (I knew him buying the MiFi was a good plan.)

When the former master database came up again, after our hosting provider replaced the network card, there was a brief problem where our image uploads (and only the image uploads) had a 50/50 chance of being directed to the wrong database. This means that approximately 40 users who uploaded userpics during the time in question have lost those userpics. (Again, the only thing affected were userpics: not comments, entries, or private messages. Everything that was text-based was fine.) The window of time in question was the night of June 17, from approximately 0200 EDT (0600 GMT) to 1100 EDT (1500 GMT).

We're really sorry about the problem (and we've fixed it so that it can't happen again in a similar situation). If you're one of the affected users, please reupload the userpics or reimport your entries/icons from the service you imported from. We're trying to get a list of affected users to contact y'all, too, just for your information, but it'll be quicker if you check yourselves!

*

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.

See you next week for our next update!

Comments

unhelpful comment is unhelpful

[tree]

...because the only reason i can think to join dreamwidth is that IT'S AWESOME. "join dreamwidth because IT IS AWESOME!" as a marketing strategy is not so effective. it's kind of the online equivalent of all those food businesses with "quality" in their names. like, "pete's quality meats". i mean, no one ever really admits to being "pete's kinda mediocre meats".

"dreamwidth: we are not pete's kinda mediocre meats".

Re: unhelpful comment is unhelpful

[denise]

"dreamwidth: we are not pete's kinda mediocre meats".

Best slogan ever.