Update, 5 August 2010

[fu]

Hello everyone! I'm a day late, but far be it for me to break tradition by posting early. I'll keep trying though; I'm sure I'll manage it some day.

I made it safely back home from the USA, where I attended OSCON and got to meet both my bosses for the first time! I also got to wander up the West Coast a bit and meet a ton of Dreamwidth folk -- and you all are fantastic :)

I ended up staying an extra night in San Francisco because of a delayed flight (it was only supposed to be a two-hour layover, oops). But it's all good: I wound up at Mark's place and we did a code push together. You may have noticed a few things that changed here and there. I'll try to cover the most interesting bits below. And now, on with the update.

Stuff that needs work

We're looking for information on which pages need the most work. Which pages do you find difficult to go through? Which pages get in your way? Which pages would you love to see re-examined and redone?

Comment and let us know!

Stuff that temporarily stopped working

• the payment system was briefly erroring out for free users since the code push. We've figured out what was wrong and have fixed things. Sorry for the inconvenience!


• the importer was having some issues earlier because of failed import attempts that were causing the import queue to back up, but we tweaked the importer to better handle that failure case, and other imports are chugging along again.


• on that note, imports from JournalFen are currently not working due to authentication issues on the other end. We've contacted them to let know what's happening. If your import from JF fails, please wait a couple of days before trying again in case things have been fixed.

Stuff that just went out to the site / the stuff that you can play with

Last week's code push was a big code push that spanned over a month's worth of bugfixes, features, and refactoring. We've been keeping a close eye on the site for any issues, and so far we have fixed a few of them, and have also tweaked other aspects of the new pages in response to feedback.

Here's some of what went out:

• We added several new themes, and have also been hard at work at having customizations be consistent across styles. We've also added a journal search module, so you can search directly from the journal page of a journal which has search enabled.
  
  New options in this code push: the ability to select text or icons for the entry- and comment-related links (for users who may have trouble with the icons); the ability to change the location of your icons and the entry metadata section; most layouts now have a one-column layout and two-column layouts for both sides. You can play around with these in your your customization options. In some cases, you may need to expand the collapsed sections by clicking on the headers.
  
  Feed accounts now have their own unique, bare-bones style with some helpful text and customizations. We moved journal stylesheets from being printed inline on the page to an external stylesheet, which helps with caching the stylesheet so it doesn't need to be loaded each time and (potentially) for debugging. In very limited cases, this may cause the stylesheets to disappear where journals have done advanced customization on their core2-based layouts (that is, layouts that are native to Dreamwidth).
  
  For screen reader users, and users who wish to be able to jump to page sections by heading level, comment titles are now wrapped in h4s; eventually top-level comment titles will use h4s, second-level comments will use h5s, and everything deeper than that will use an h6. The tag cloud code for layouts has been redone to be more semantic and to provide the number of tag uses in text form, instead of relying purely on font size.
  
  foxfirefey posted a full rundown of all the style changes that went live with this code push, which explains more that I couldn't cover here and also covers potential issues and fixes.



• We've redone the edit profile page. A few settings were moved from the settings page to the manage profile page, and the privacy level is displayed right beside the relevant setting so you can see at a glance who can see what information, and you can also edit the privacy level right there.



• More helpful page when you are viewing protected entries that you're not allowed to see. If you run into a locked entry while logged out, you get two login forms so you can login as either a Dreamwidth user or an OpenID user. If you're already logged in, it's just ever so slightly prettier and has a friendlier error message.
  
  If you are trying to view a locked entry in a community that's open to members, you also have the "join community" link right there in front of you.
  
  (The improvements to locked entries are one of my favorite things with this new code push)



• Some new things for you with tracking. We have one new way for you to track comments: you can now just track only top-level comment notifications instead of all comment notifications to an entry. So you can keep track of direct replies to the entry without being overwhelmed by all the subthreads.
  
  We also have one tiny tweak when you're trying to track new entries to a specific tag on a journal. If you click "track" from an entry, the tags for that entry will be displayed at the top, to make it easy to find and select them.



• For crossposting, one thing that has been much in demand: allowing different crosspost footers for when comments are enabled and disabled here on Dreamwidth. You can customize your crosspost footer settings under the Other Sites section of your account settings.
  
  One other issue that cropped up every once in a while: if you crossposted something, then you deleted it from the other side, we now give you a warning if you try to crosspost it again. If you confirm that you want to crosspost the entry, you can force it to be recreated. If not, it won't crosspost.



• Here's something that's a bit more technical for your Dreamwidth journal feeds. Basically, the entry ids are supposed to never change once assigned, and there was a chance that they could be changed by things such as the account being renamed. We made the decision to change them this once, in order to have correctly generated entry ids for the future. If you noticed in your feed reader that entries you had read were suddenly marked as read, that would be because of the entry id format change. This is a one-time event, and won't happen again.



• Last, some toys and other small things. We've improved the way that Tropospherical handles wide elements, so it should be working better now for deep comment threads, wide images, and the like. We've also fixed a couple of annoying issues where after posting a form you'd either get redirected to the wrong page (incorrect thread), or were returning to the correct page, but without a ?style=light/style=mine. And speaking of redirects, http://shop.dreamwidth.org/ redirects to http://www.dreamwidth.org/shop/; http://mobile.dreamwidth.org/ redirects to http://www.dreamwidth.org/mobile.
  
  The current mood of service appears to be amused (as of the time of this writing). If you're more technically inclined and would like to see the top moods, you can see them in the current mood of service, JSON format. (Tired and amused have been fighting for the top spot for a while now)
  
  And finally if you have been to the update page, you may have seen the new "random icon" toy. When you click on the link, one of your icons will be chosen randomly. If you don't like it, you can click again. And if none of the randomly chosen icons appeal to you, you can always override manually by selecting the keyword from the dropdown.
  



And that's it for this week!

As usual, if you run into any issues, you can turn to Support. Support is awesome! I got to meet one of the three Support heads while I was in the USA, and I can assure you that Support people do not bite. So: 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.

Comments

[ex_rising236]

The random icon thing is fun. I've been using it for any entry that I don't start with an icon in mind for. Could we get that toy for leaving comments too? (If the mechanism already exists, theoretically shouldn't be too hard to implement, I would think.)

And the edit profile page is nifty. It looks a lot better now.

[cesy]

Yes, I assumed that random icon would be available for comments, too, and I really want it.

[briarwood]

+1 I'd use it more for comments than I'm likely to for entries.

So please?

[ex_rising236]

Sadly I am not that good at coding and really don't want to learn that much otherwise I would go and do it myself. But yeah.

[fu]

The bug is still open for the comments part! So yes, eventually *g*

[kyrielle]

Yay!!

[yvi]

Working on it :)

[stormy]

The changes to those lines on the Edit Profile page are stellar. So much easier to read! ♥

[isis]

I wound up at Mark's place and we did a code push together.

So that's what kids are calling it these days.

[azurelunatic]

*giggle*

[auroraprimavera]

You guys are awesome \o/

[luinied]

A minor thing, but: I cross-post to LJ and use an old Core 1 style, and today the order of metadata fields changed from "mood, music" to "music, mood". Is anyone else seeing this? And was it intentional?

Obviously it's easy enough for me to force an ordering on metadata fields in my style if I want to, although I'm not sure if I'll bother. I was just curious.

[codeman38]

I think LJ is just having issues. My color scheme (also S1) seems to be randomly disappearing and reappearing.

[kareila]

I'm seeing it in my journal, and it was not intentional. I'm going to try to figure out a fix, but it probably won't be available until the next code push.

S1 Known Issues?

[markmanching]

speaking of the S1 issues. here i found the LJ's Support Page added in Bold Text:

If you are using a style from the old (S1) style system, your journal may be displaying incorrectly. (e.g. Mood, Time, and Location) Developers will have this fixed in a future release. In the meantime, refreshing the page may help, or you may wish to temporarily switch your style to one on the current system (S2).

Re: S1 Known Issues?

[denise]

We don't have S1, so that doesn't apply to us (and LJ's changes don't sync to here anyway; we have to decide to specifically add them, and then do a lot of work to make it happen, since we've diverged so widely by now). The poster up there was talking about core1, which was the version of S2 that we inherited from LJ (and then fixed up a ton, leading to core2.)

I know, it's confusing!

...oh, wait, you were talking about entries crossposted to LJ! Nevermind. *facepalm*

Re: S1 Known Issues?

[markmanching]

*facepalms* myself, my gawds T_T

[angelikitten]

Yay for being able to position the metadata! If only I could do the same for tags, my layout would be perfect.

[ninetydegrees]

If you haven't already done so, here's the page to suggest it. :)

[angelikitten]

I would, but my reasons for wanting it are ridiculously pathetic. Also, I'm not so good at describing/explaining things :(

[ninetydegrees]

Well, my reasons for suggesting something rarely go beyond "I really, really want it and this would make my life easier". ;)

Here's the suggestion for metadata if it can help you.

[matgb]

One of my suggestions was motivated "because I prefer it that way", and it's on the list of things D posted for babydev work already.

SRSLY, an improvement is an improvement, if you'd prefer it a different way, suggest it, it's how the site grows.

[jd]

I really like the edit profile redesign.

[faevii]

Now I really want to come across a link to an entry I can't access. ;)

New options in this code push: the ability to select text or icons for the entry- and comment-related links (for users who may have trouble with the icons)

Wow, thanks. That was bugging me SO MUCH. I can never remember what those freaking icons mean, so I went through all the layouts trying to find one that both looked good and didn't have them. Took me a while. Now I have way more to choose from! Yay!

[cesy]

This is a private entry.

[sophie]

Ack, you beat me by 6 minutes. >_>

[faevii]

A-ha! LOL, thanks. Curiosity satisfied!

[sophie]

Here you go! http://sophie.dreamwidth.org/28360.html

(that's a private entry I just made. Notice how you can easily click to log out on that screen and log in as someone else, and of course if you're logged out by accident you're just one screen away from the entry - assuming you'd be able to see it, which in this case you won't, but still!)

[markmanching]

try me as you can! http://markmanching.dreamwidth.org/11817.html

ETA: LJ is Added the Reject Images for Image Upload and Scrapbook (some links included)

[kopernik]

We have one new way for you to track comments: you can now just track only top-level comment notifications instead of all comment notifications to an entry

Are you guys reading my mind? I was JUST thinking how handy it would be to be able to do that. Thank you!

[ex_pseudonym472]

Thanks for the update!

[erebus_x]

I really like the mood tracker. It's amusing. :)

[lanterne_rouee]

thank you for the update! glad you had some fun while you were here in the US.

[green_knight]

Where is the 'random icon' link supposed to be? I can't see it on the update page yet. Will watch and file a bug report if this persists.

[denise]

Right under the icon drop-down, there's "View thumbnails" and "Choose random icon".

[auguris]

We added several new themes, and have also been hard at work at having customizations be consistent across styles.

and you can also edit the privacy level right there

My love for DW is deeper than the deep blue sea. Or, well, something like that.

[nanbungaku]

you guys keep giving me reasons to why I should upgrade my free account to a paid one
(even if I'm not here much, but it's money worth spent)

This is totally unrelated to anything in the post, but I couldn't think where else to go to ask this

[havocthecat]

I'm sure y'all have read LJ's latest news post, where we're told that users who delete their journals will now have the ability to delete all their comments as well (and comm entries).

Will that also delete all their comments made on Dreamwidth with OpenID, or the comments that users have imported into Dreamwidth journals that mirror their LJ journals?

Re: This is totally unrelated to anything in the post, but I couldn't think where else to go to ask

[denise]

No, there's no communication between the two.