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

[hope]

There should be a "Select" button at the bottom of that icon browser - is it showing up?

Either way, thanks for the feedback :)

[bedlamsbard]

Initial thoughts --

Like a couple other people have said, the text box seems really small, especially among the plethora of options out there. Since writing the entry is actually the point of posting, is there a possibility it could be made larger? My initial thought is put the right hand column down below the text box and have the text box centered on the screen with nothing on either side of it, because the way my brain works, I can't look at it, the right-hand column immediately draws my eye and distracts me, and I'd rather be able to look just at the textbox instead of being distracted by this other shiny. (On the right hand side. Which is, I think, my dominant side; I'm less distracted by things in a left-hand column.) And if it's down below, then the three columns are all next to each other! Which seems much more orderly than the current scheme, at least to me.

Agreeing with other people about the location of the post button -- putting it on the right hand side seems much more intuitive. Although it seems like it would be nice to have the delete button on the same level as the post button, for symmetry, because right now it looks like it's out of place below that pink bar.

The bubble tags don't work for me visually, especially the way they end up stacking -- too much empty white space if you have a one line tag, followed by a two-line tag, followed by another one line tag, in which case the third tag goes down below and there is all this blank space between it and the one-line tag above it! If that makes sense?

Permalink is AMAZING.

Since there's an option for going to one's cross-posting settings from the cross-post box, would it be possible for there to be an option to go to one's upload icon page from the icon box? Since I know there have been numerous times when I clap my hands and go, "OMG I MUST HAVE THIS ICON ON THIS POST BUT IT IS NOT UPLOADED YET" and then have to go through the whole rigmarole of clicking off the page, uploading, hoping that the entry saved with all the metadata, and then being able to use that new awesome icon.

Huh, thought upon comparing it to the current page (which I have to admit I like considerably better because it's not as visually distracting) -- are there going to be "insert image" and "embed media" options?

It's so -- busy. And not stream-lined. I want to like it, but it doesn't work with the way my brain works very well.

[fu]

Quick note! I think that was the next-to-latest version that we showed you. In this one, when it's a draft, it says:

Status: Draft

And clicking "save" in the status box there will save it as a draft *g*

(And posting is at the bottom, after the options, still)

[hope]

Could you choose which one you wanted saved as your default, somewhere? There are personal-set defaults for lots of other options on that page...

[nigeltde]

That would be cool!

[pocketmouse]

It looks like information overload. I think it's in part that by breaking everything up into its own boxes, it all suddenly looks like more. And collapsing a couple boxes here and there won't really help with that. If we could close the boxes, so they were gone, and then there was a panel in preferences or a 'restore all' button or something to bring them back up again, that might work for me. Also, if all the boxes were freeform instead of locked to columns, and I could just move them around to how I wanted them ordered. That way I could put all the collapsed boxes together and they'd be easier to ignore.

And until someone pointed them out, I didn't even notice the post/delete buttons. They're so far away.

Also, I didn't see any alt-text on any of the images on the icon tab. I clicked on the one that turned out to have that popup with the preview of all the icons, and the popup a. failed to load (but my connection is crap ATM, so I'm not ruling out me) b. didn't have a close window/cancel button, so when it failed to load I had to refresh the page.

[sophie]

One question; will the permalink preview show up for creating a post, or only editing a post? (or to put it in technical terms, will the anum be decided when loading the Update page, or will it continue to be decided only when the entry is actually posted?)

I can see it being quite useful to have the former in the case where you're giving out code for a linkable colorbar and you want to have it link back to the entry, but I imagine it would also be problematic in some cases, so I'm guessing it's probably just when editing?

[hope]

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.

Can I ask what browser, operating system and screen resolution (e.g. 800x600) you're using? fu and I did do a bunch of coding to get the design to degrade gracefully on different resolutions; it'd be good to know what we've missed so we can fix it!

[tyger]

It's all right, I suppose.
Things that bug me:
• in order to have the right-column, I need to stretch my browser waaaay too far; I have it set to ~800 pixels wide 'cause that's what I read off best, but the mock-up requires almost all of my screen to have the column, which makes me twitchy. And if the column ISN'T there it's a lot less intuitive a design. (I'd sacrifice entry-writing width to use the column, though in that case it'd be better if it were longer - perhaps as long as the column is? I don't know.)
• That being said, still SO MUCH STUFF EVERYWHERE OMG, it tends to overload my brain and my eyes glaze over, which of course means it takes quite a while to find anything. I think it probably needs more white space.
• 'Currents' make me think of the food, which is also confusing. Small change such as making it 'Current:' would utterly eliminate that, however.
• I want to make the entirety of 'security and restrictions' go away, and leave the room it took up for the 'publishing' modules to flow over and spread out, is that sort of... I don't know, reverse-cascade possible?
• The headings can be selected like you can drag them, but they don't drag. This is confusing.
• Similarly, the text-boxes look like you can resize them, but you can't. (This might just be Safari, however.) I do think that being able to resize the entry-post box at least would make people feel better about things, though; they can have as much space as they'd like.
• The icon-selecter tool doesn't work for me either, in the same way a comment above described.
• When collapsing things down far enough to get to two columns the icon/tags/etc modules do reverse-cascade, but in the exact opposite order than what I'd expect, which is also confusing.

tl;dr: set up to work with really wide browsers, and buttons-everywhere-confusing.

[pocketmouse]

Yes, this too. I was thinking along these lines as I looked at it. I can think of a couple people on my LJ flist that would never post at DW if they had to figure out this new interface.

[fu]

It should show up any time you have an anum, so not every time the update page is loaded, but probably once it's saved as a draft by the user. And then obviously once it's been posted and you're editing.

[sophie]

The close button is meant to be in the top-right corner of the icon popup selector, but I agree that a Cancel button would be good too.

[feathertail]

Yes ... I can understand if most of the people here are excited about it, but it doesn't seem like anyone's thinking of the newbs. Or at least, able to empathize with them.

[nigeltde]

if the boxes were freeform and not locked to columns, my pants would be happy for a long, long time.

[harpers_child]

i figured it out by clicking on it.

[forthwritten]

I'm getting the red flash too (Firefox 3.6.8)

[pocketmouse]

OK, it showed up this time. I'm going to hope that was a case of slow load or whatever, but it's one of several reasons I hate that type of popup in general.

[hat_plays_sims]

Ooooh, the Post button is super-far away from the Delete button. That should make me feel like less of an idiot! (Don't care which side is which, I'll work that out, but with them far apart, there's so much less chance I'll click one when I mean the other.)

[ex_pseudonym472]

*squishes you* This is one of the reasons why I love Dreamwidth. Instead of having it populated with trolls, it's populated with people who give strangers hugs, and it isn't even creepy.

[msilverstar]

Never occurred to me before, but it would be really nice to know what the journal default settings are, especially for posting to communities. Maybe some kind of label/menu combination?

[lorax]

I love the new mockup! It's easy to use and very intuitive, I think.

My only longing, and I may be the only one who prefers this, is for an option to have the tag drop-box display on posting, as you do when you use the "edit tags" function, so you can just select your tags rather than typing them in, in comms and journals where the tag system is complex, and typing in the first few letters mays still bring up twenty tags!

[hat_plays_sims]

Actually, reading others' comments and playing with the page myself? I like Post where it is. Yeah, okay, Delete sticks out a bit more, but Post is on the left under comments, Yes always seems to come before No when your (Windows) computer pops up an error message, and I think I'd get confused if the button I push when I mean "Yes, it's good, post this now!" were on the side where "No, don't do that," "cancel," "preview," "more options," or whatever normally are. Even if you end up having to move those buttons closer together for the sake of folk who don't want Post waaaaaay over on the left side when Delete is waaaaaay over on the right, Post should stay to the left of Delete.

[ane]

Any chance the post/delete bar could be right under the text window instead of way down at the bottom?

I'm also in agreement with others who say that it seems like the post and delete buttons should be switched around.

Otherwise I like it, especially being able to collapse the boxes.

[foxfirefey]

I don't think that comparison will be taken wrong--WordPress was a study case for this!

[valentinite]

Issue (sorry if this has already been filed): If I start entering a tag, hit down to go into the autocomplete options, decide I've mistyped and go back up to the entry box, it moves my cursor to the beginning. Which is not intuitive and doesn't let me start deleting what I typed wrong.

I do think there's way too much for basic users -- I'd use it as-is just fine, but my fingers still type "blahblahblah/update.bml?mode=full" by default when posting.