Weekly Update: August 12

[denise]

Hello, Dreamwidth! There is currently a hole in our bathroom shower wall. Maintenance swore they'd have it completely fixed by today. Considering that there's only half an hour left of today's working hours ... I think we might be showering in the downstairs exercise room again today. (Ew.)

Thankfully, we've been a lot less remiss in finishing and fixing things here on DW. Let's go through the week's announcements, and I'll save the best for last.

Development

Development this week has mostly gone to bugfixes from last week's code push, all of which are now live. You can check out the week's code tour if you're curious. Welcome this week goes to new contributor cpm!

We think we've caught most of the bugfixes from the last code push, but if there's anything that you're still having problems with, let Support know!

Feeds

This code push finally fixed the ability for us to merge duplicate feed accounts into one, so I went ahead and did all the ones that people reported a while back. From here, if you notice duplicate feed accounts (two feed accounts pulling the same content, even if it's not the same feed URL), please report them to Support -- they'll be able to fix them up for you.

Styles

Our last code push made it so that people can display the entry management links in their styles as either text or icons, which a lot of people have asked for! We have a lot of themes by now, though, so some of them have turned out to have display problems. We're fixing those, but if you've got a few minutes, stop in and give dw_styles a hand in checking themes to make sure there aren't any more problems we're missing.

Communities

It's been a while since we've had community-of-the-week here in news updates, and I'd like to bring it back! This week, pauamma suggests forkedtongues, a community for discussion about languages, translations, and the experience of being multilingual.

If you've got an active community that you love and want more members for, or are looking for some new communities to join, check out dw_community_promo.

Update Page

I did promise the best for last, right?

A little while ago, we unveiled the first draft of our new update page (being revised as the first step to adding draft & scheduled posts functionality). We got some great feedback (and thank you to everyone who left it!), and we're now ready to show you guys version 2.0.

This version incorporates most of the feedback you guys left, and is a result of some great partnership work between fu and hope, whose mad design skills has taken my initial crappy pencil sketches and fu's much more awesome first draft and done a lot of work on them.

Things to note for this version:

* As suggested, we've moved the draft and scheduled post management onto another page (which hasn't been turned into a working version yet, but we do have the first mockups of that done -- we'll show that one off in a few weeks.)

* We've moved around a lot of options to the places people said they'd rather see them, so hopefully it will be more intuitive for people to use.

* We've fixed up a lot of the visual presentation, so the eye travels more smoothly across the screen.

* We've done a bunch of bugfixes, so any problems you reported in the last round should be fixed by now.

Like last time, this is still a demo; it won't work to post entries to your journal, and it won't use your tags or your icons. Give it another look and see what else you can suggest for us to improve it further:

Create Entries Demo 2.0

*

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 (when hopefully the hole in my bathroom wall will be fixed) for our next update.

Comments

[flick]

Fabulous! You are good!

Now, when will I be able to read selected bits of my LJ FL on DW...?

[alexseanchai]

Oooo SHINY.

[noracharles]

Beautiful update page! It looks great on my small netbook screen. Thank you for the permalink preview, I'm very, very happy you took that suggestion :-D

The only thing I'm not a fan of is the tag bubbles, because I can't click them and edit them when/if I make a typo. I like the distinction of the solid border established tags and the broken border new tags, but I'd prefer the new tags to be editable. Also, I find the tags difficult to read, because the text is tiny, the background is colored and especially the broken border is busy and doesn't have a lot of margin space. I would like to have the option of plain text tag editing.

[denise]

Reading page goes by time posted, not time datestamped -- if you write an entry over 24 hours, and then hit post, it won't display 24 hours back on reading pages, it'll display on the top. So, that's not so much a concern.

The argument about whether or not to autoupdate time on post is perpetual. *g* Many people prefer it the exact opposite, because they want the timestamp to read when they started writing the entry instead of when they posted it. Every time we poll it, it's about evenly split, so in those cases we generally go with the status quo for the default and introduce the option if we think it suits.

[denise]

It is a very hard problem! We are trying to solve it in a way that doesn't get us immediately banned from accessing LJ.

[meretia]

Ah, that's quite nice! I like the customizability of the page and option to turn the animations on/off; they look good, but it's always nice to have the choice. Only major suggestion I'd make is to switch the position of the Post and Delete buttons; I'm a righty and my eye and hand go right for the one on the right.

One thing I'm wondering about, will the final version have the option to save more than one draft at a time? For example, if I write a draft of a post and schedule it to post on August 24th and then I write a new post that I leave half-finished, will the auto-save overwrite the old draft?

[elfin]

Ah, cool. Thanks.

[quinara]

I think for me it's mostly to do with the fact that I use very few non-default options with my entries - they're nearly always the same in terms of lock/age-restriction/commenting - so I'll probably end up with everything collapsed apart from drafts, icon-seleciton and tags. And that leaves you with a very small page scrunched up in the middle of the screen. :(

As for confusing newbies, I can definitely imagine that happening. Some of the text choices seem a little obscure. I'm probably too used to faux-friendly copy, but I wonder why things like 'can comment' couldn't be simply 'who can comment?', with the box naturally answering the question.

This is just me being picky though! I'll use what I'm given. :D

[timeasmymeasure]

Going at it bit by bit:

First let me say I love love the new icon browser for the update page. It's awesome! I love that I can collapse/expand the little modules at will. The tags are absolutely adorable. This is a personal preference thing, but I'd prefer the 'Scheduling Publishing' box to be above the 'Post to Journal', or right under it.

I love everything else =D
Thanks for this!

[denise]

There will be multiple draft support, yes! How many drafts you get to store and schedule at once will probably depend on account type, but everyone will be able to do at least one or two. And nothing will overwrite anything without warning.

[maqui]

I'm really liking the new update page. I especially love the way it handles tags, both with telling users how many characters they have left per tag and the method of displaying tags that you've already input for the entry in separate, outlined bubbles with an easy method of removal for each one. It's definitely useful and intuitive, especially for entries where someone might need a lot of tags and accidentally adds one they didn't mean to - it's easier to spot and remove the mistake before posting this way.

[kerravonsen]

I just realized something that I use that would be gone with the new update page: being able to cut and paste tags from an old entry to a new entry. That is, I'd make an entry of a particular sort (say, fic recs from a particular fic fest), and it had the following tags:
fic:recs, fandom:harry potter, ficathon:sshg 2010

Then a week later, I'd make another recs post, but I couldn't remember all the tags I'd done on the previous post, but I'd want them to be the same, so I'd find the old post, edit it, copy the content of the tags field, and then paste it into the new post. (I discovered that one can't cut-and-paste from the entry itself, because the tags are coded as a list, which means one gets a bunch of "*" characters mixed in with the tags)

The new update page means one can't do that any more. Mind you, the new tag-completion would probably mitigate that problem, so I'm not sure how much of a problem it will end up being, but I thought I'd better mention this use-case anyway.

[meretia]

That's fantastic to hear! One of the things that drove me nuts about LJ and Semagic's post window both was how easy it was to lose the massive Post of Doom I'd been writing if I didn't post it right away.

[harpers_child]

"reduce animations" refers to the animation shown when compressing the boxes on the right. reduced animations mean that the box is either opened or closed and there is no transition shown.

[ninetydegrees]

Same here, to the point that I prefer the current version to this version (and I liked the first mockup a lot). I don't know where to look at and it's so white everywhere and I hate the bottom part.

Question: is it pretty much a done deal to push Post to Journal below the message box?

Bug report: the tags box doesn't look right for me (15px font size, 1440px wide resolution, Firefox 3.6.8). I think the text field is too big for the box so it's overlapping the border and the whole box looks half-formed.

Bug report 2: when collapsing boxes, I sometimes get a red screen of death i.e. a blinding, flashing red screen the same color as the background color. This seems completely random and doesn't happen very often.

[jumpuphigh]

Thanks. I missed that.

[gchick]

/me wants to has NOW

But I agree with numerous other commenters about switching the post and delete buttons.

And I'd find it easier to scan if it said "Who Can Comment" rather than "Can Comment"; the latter sounds to me like a Y/N question, possibly in LOLcatese, rather than an everyone/some people/nobody question.

I like having a preview of the permalink, but at the same time it makes me realize how very badly I really want human-readable permalinks; I know that's out of scope for this discussion, but I'll get my ass over to bugs + suggestions when I get back to the computer later.

[jumpuphigh]

Thanks. I missed that.

[sarken]

Here as well. Other than that, though, I love it!

[jumpuphigh]

It would be good to have that explanation as a pop-up of some sort (maybe when mousing over an "i") along with why someone may want one or the other to be selected. Users who are fairly tech-savvy don't need that information but it would be helpful for users who are dipping their toes into this type of platform for the first time.

[inarticulate]

Oh, wow, the new update page looks even more amazing than the last! :D I love the options, and having them all available to me along with the option to collapse the things I don't use on a regular basis.

[denise]

it makes me realize how very badly I really want human-readable permalinks

On the list already; it's not in Bugzilla yet because I haven't finished the spec, but it's something I want to do, yes.

[unixronin]

The new update page looks good, though when I open it up, the top of the Entry box overlaps the poll creator/formatting/spellcheck placeholders, and the Status, Icon, tags and Current boxes overlap the Entry box and Subject line. I have an extension that lets me resize text entry boxes, but the Subject line still extends under the Status box.

Also, moving all the extra boxes over to the left side of the page (or making them float against the right side) and killing the large deadspace areas on both sides of the page would make considerably more room for the actual entry. And maybe then, particularly with the additional boxes at left, there wouldn't be any field overlaps.

[auroraprimavera]

I could actually see myself deleting a post by accident. Especially if I was editing something. Maybe make it a bit less easy to mess up? If that makes any sense.

[karayan]

Going to have to chime in that I also would like to see the Post button on the right rather than on the left. Aside from that, though, I like this muchly.