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

[whatdoyousee]

Oh gawd, I love the Creat Entry page, I can't even pick one thing I like best. *waaants it*

[syderia]

I really like the new update page.

[trinity_clare]

1. This is so much better than the first draft! <3

2. There is just SO. MUCH. STUFF. on the page. (Very well organized, though!) But I think, as other commenters have said, that this problem could be fixed by expanding the size of the entry box. I think I'm reacting to the modules as a percentage of the total page, and making the entry box bigger and more important would help a lot with that. (Also, that box is just too small. It just is. I might end up adding a vote for the one-column layout with the box stretching across the screen.)

3. Why the tag bubbles? I want my tags to behave as text, not images. It seems like an arbitrary change for no benefit.

4. Maybe the bottom of the page could look like this:
[Preview ----- (whitespace) --- POST ENTRY --- (whitespace) ----- Delete]
Yes? Maybe?

[eosrose]

The update page looks gorgeous! Thanks for all your hard work, guys. I'm really excited to see this put into action. :)

[holyschist]

I, personally, like the new update page mockup--but I'm familiar with Wordpress, so I like both its similarities and the fact that it's simpler.

I do have concerns about it being simple enough for people who are a) not familiar with LJ clones, Wordpress, or similarly complex interfaces and b) not power users by nature.

More on that later when I'm more awake.

[seryn]

There should be post/delete buttons at the top also. They should be in the standard order. That way I don't have to collapse all the other stuff and don't have to scroll past it either.

Otherwise all of this is better than what's available now. No question that this is an improvement. Because the current posting thing is only tolerable because it means I don't have to download something and kludge it to work with DW instead of whatever other brand it was designed for. It's been irritating that apparently the entire rest of the journaling world still browses at a fixed 800x600, so all praise goes toward the success of this project. It's about 6 years overdue and DW has only been around for 1.5 of them.

In my opinion, adding a tag should be one of those dialog boxes that appear when something is clicked instead of combining selecting from the current list with the add feature. Otherwise I'm going to constantly be looking for the manage tags link to unscrew it up. Which is what I'm doing now, so....

There's too much whitespace in the icon box. It's strange because the icon choosing has all this room but the actual composition part is cramped with other stuff touching it. It looks like the right column could be 15-20% narrower with no loss of function (but would almost guarantee more scrolling, which would suck). Or maybe the composition box should be 2 lines shorter so there could actually be space between it and the gray subheaders saying "Publishing" and "Security and Restrictions". Not that I want the text box smaller, just that the way those are adjacent to the text box instead of touching their options makes it seem like those things are more important than the text.

I looked at it as, "Oh, as long as there's a picture icon, you don't care what I have to say, you're going to interrupt with all your ephemera." Obviously the point of spending all this effort to redesign the posting form is NOT to tell me to shut up, and I suspect this is subtle psychology. Probably subtle changes would help. If stuff has to be crammed to the point of touching, it should be the options that get crammed.

There are mini-icons that do things which are not transparent-- the gear in crossposting and the little tv sets with something in them next to the icon. When you mouse over them, there isn't something informative that tells you what's going to happen. And since just typing in the tags box will add random crap that's hard to get rid of, who knows what clicking the gear will do? Maybe it resets the servers for all of DW. Clicking the tv with the question mark clearly changes my neighbor's TV to VCR mode and I'll be hearing Hee-Haw reruns until 4am. (I'm absolutely sure that testing this page out caused that effect here (please change it to someone else's neighbor!!!) )

---
On the whole, this seems like a lot of the suggestions from the earlier demo were taken into account. It's better. It's not exactly what I wanted, but shockingly I didn't get elected Queen of the Universe while no one else was looking and I'm going to have to compromise with all the other people who actually fill in their location and make sticky posts.

This is a LOT better than what's out there now.

And hey, for the people who want it just to be a text box and no options, maybe there could be a mobile version? That'd be cool and if you mentioned its URL, then all the people who want that even on their normal computers could bookmark it.

[sally_maria]

I really like it.

I get what people are saying about the bottom being busy, but it's below the fold, so it's not as it hits you when you first open the page.

I like the size of the input box - it's about the same width as an actual journal entry, if you have one sidebar, as lots of people do. It's a great way of judging just how far what I've typed will go down the page, which makes deciding whether I need to cut for length or not a lot easier.

[ninetydegrees]

Now that I've had time to think this over, I'd like to articulate my thoughts better and group them together.

General impression

Dreamwidth has always impressed me by it ability to make things simpler and easier to use despite the addition of new functionalities, options, menus, links, etc. Take the site navigation bar, for example. I feel this is somewhat going into the opposite direction. I also agree that this seems geared towards power users: users who tag extensively, crosspost to lots of sites to get a wider audience or keep in touch with people, have many filters to manage their gigantic friends list, post very regularly. Not being this kind of user, this makes me feel unwelcome.

Page Design

-- The new mock-up doesn't match any other existing page on the site making yet another design to get used to and leaving me without a frame of reference. If I know what a header looks like you don't have to tell me it's a header. If I know what options look like, you don't have to tell me it's an option. Either I already know or I'll figure it out very quickly. I expected this page to look like Edit Profile.

-- The option boxes aren't visually distinctive enough from Entry and Subject. The color scheme used here doesn't guide my eye to the important elements and doesn't let me easily ignore elements I have no or little use for, as if posting necessarily implied fiddling with options.

-- The number of expanded boxes and the number of boxes in general is overwhelming. It shifts the focus of the page to options. It puts emphasis on control, not on posting. I could see myself loving this page if I was organizing a community challenge, writing a multi-chaptered story or blogging about politics, but not if I simply wanted to post a picture or share my favorite recipe. The latter is what DW is for me; if you look at http://www.dreamwidth.org/latest you'll see many simple, short posts.

-- There isn't enough space between all the elements and within boxes. Again, this makes it hard to distinguish between elements and to let you sort very quickly between what's important to you and what isn't.

-- The icons are hard to understand and don't add anything to the page. They don't make it more fancier or prettier; they're just one more thing to figure out, learn, remember. I would like them to be replaced by text links.

-- I don't like seeing the header change background color on hover. Also the text becomes unreadable when it happens.

-- The bottom part looks very clunky. The two-column thing doesn't work for me at all and I don't see the point of the section headings. They seem redundant and there's not enough color contrast between the background color and the text color to make them visible enough.

-- I'd like "expand all/collapse all" options above "reduce animations".

Sidebar Boxes

-- Status: I feel Save and Preview are in a counter-intuitive place. I'd like these to be grouped with Post. Otherwise you have to go back and forth between the top and the bottom to preview and post. I agree that Save should say "Save draft" or "Save as draft".

-- Icon: menu and icon are misaligned and there's too much white space.

-- Tags: I like the tag suggestion menu but I don't like that it goes over other elements. I agree that a tag list would be more useful in some cases but the current system is useful too. What about a "Show as list" option?

-- Currents: I'd like currents and tags to be switched to mimic the order they're displayed in entries. It would feel more intuitive to me. Currents doesn't mean anything to me. "Metadata" or "Extra Data" would be more explicit. In the Mood menu "None, or other:" doesn't make sense to me. Why not simply have it say "None" and trust people to notice the text field below when they're ready to? Got it.
Music and location are very tiny.

-- Date: I'd like the current date to be more immediately visible. I want to know when I post without having to scroll down. The Update Time function is no longer there. It was useful. Screw that.

Bottom Boxes

-- Post to Journal: not in a good place for me. I'd like it to be at the top so that I don't forget about it and immediately know which journal I'm posting too: if I have several open tabs to post entries to several journals, how do I know which one I'm writing to if I have to scroll to the bottom all the time? But I'd also like the text of the post button to dynamically change according to my selection: if I post to my own journal have it say so; if I post to suggestions, have it say "Post to dw_suggestions". This way I can check again that I'm posting where I want to when I hit the Post button.

-- Comments: agree with changing to "Email comments?" And a menu seems overkill. I'd like to have radio buttons.

-- Scheduled Publishing: I don't really understand how it works. I think the options should be reversed: first select the frequency then select the date and add a label for that to make it clearer.BTW if you pick never and change the date, it is like future-dating? And for some reason I expected this box to be grouped with other some other date/publishing options. Something like: publish with updated date, publish with a later date, publish with an earlier date, make recurrent, make sticky. Got it and screw that.

Action Bar

-- I feel the action bar should be duplicated below the message box. That way, if I want to make a quick post, I don't have to scroll past the options and if I've changed options I don't have to scroll up either. A bit like what you've done with the Inbox.

-- I feel Post is in a counter-intuitive place. I'd like Post and Delete to be switched. Right now it feels like a test: are you clever enough to hit the right button? Like the "Are you really over 18? No - Yes" pop-ups on some sites. :)

- I agree that Delete should say "Delete entry" or "Delete draft".

About the two version idea

Having two separate versions would not encourage users to learn/discover new functionalities. There's a difference between not shoving all the bells and whistles in one's face and removing them. Doing this wouldn't be like the HTML vs RTE editors. You can do exactly the same things in both editors. RTE just makes it easier.

Create Entries mockup

[susanreads]

This is a big improvement, but there are still things to be picky about:

I've seen comments about what happens to the right-hand column when the screen is narrower, but it doesn't do it for me. If I make my browser window very narrow, I get an unfeasibly narrow entry box and 3 ridiculously narrow columns. I thought the previous version did do the rearranging into fewer columns, so I don't know what's going on there. (Laptop: Firefox 3.0.10, Windows XP, 1600x1200 resolution. Tower: Firefox 2.0.0.8, Win98, 1024x768)

The Delete button looks odd, not just in being on the right but overlapping the pink stripe.

Please add text for "browse icons" and "random icon". I also find some of the wording opaque: "Can Comment", "Send Email" (I guess is email me comments received), "never" in the Recurring option (isn't it once? or perhaps change the option to Repeat).

I don't usually get the red flash when collapsing boxes that some people have reported, but I did a couple of times.

I like the tag bubbles (and different outline for new ones!), but can you make them editable?

Please put Preview below the entry box. I'll want to do that whenever I finish typing, and I think that's something a lot of people will do. I'd think the same would apply to Spellcheck, for people who use it.

I look forward to seeing this in other siteschemes. I guess it'll look very different in Gradations.

[ardhra]

Sorry if this has been mentioned already, but it's not clear in this version how you save a post as a draft.

[evercharmer]

The new update page looks great, but it's very cluttered. I think the content should get more space and everything else should be below it, but that could just be me.

[justhuman]

Love the layout and usability overall

I *adore* the tags
-although, having an option to see all the tags would be good. I know my own tags but I'm usually not sure for communities. Perhaps typing a space could give the whole list to start people off

I think the icons work great and thanks for not shrinking the icons to 20x20

I do agree with the others - the post button and the delete button need to be swapped.

[aedifica]

ohhhhhhh! I checked out the new demo entry page, and tried the tab autocompletion, and suddenly I'm in love! I had no idea how badly I wanted tab autocompletion that would display a dropdown!

\o/

[out_there]

The mock-up entry page looks awesome. I love that you've managed to give everyone a lot of easier options, while also giving the ability to keep it really simple for -- well, users like me who only use the fancy options once in a blue moon.

[ciaan]

Update page looks great!

[aka]

Viewing the new update page on an iPhone results in a lot of squishing and overlap at the top (above the entry box). Idk if there's a mobile-specific update page in the works, but otherwise it looks cool. Can't wait to get home & check it out on a full size screen!

[theshadowpanther]

Dunno if I'm being a wet rag here, but the placement of Security and Restrictions options and the Publishing sections feels jarring. I'm so used to Publishing being on the left and the Security on the right. Having it the other way around feels counter-intuitive to me. :(

Other than that, love everything.

[alyndra]

Hmm. Some things better, some things worse. I love that everything's collapsible now, but it also makes me really really want all the collapsible stuff in one place, not some below and some to the right. Would there be some way I can get the narrow-screen version without physically having to make my window narrower, or the previously mentioned ability to drag boxes around?

And while still loving that there are so many options to reduce stuff i don't need, it is imperfect because there are now too many boxes. I counted and there are eleven collapsibles. It seems like more. Even if you collapse everything, there is still a lot of stuff sitting there looking at you. I would at the very least combine the Access and Age Restriction boxes, because having an entire box for a single thing is silly. You might as well just have the thing, because it would take up less space and be more accessible.

You could also I think combine Post to Journal and Crosspost fairly easily, because if you don't have Crosspost ticked, the journal names don't really need to show up until you do. I think it would make sense for those both to be in one box, and people who only post to one journal can collapse the whole thing, and people who post to different journals but don't crosspost won't be any worse off than they are now. I wish I could compare to the old demo; I seem to remember it was sleeker than the current crosspost function.

I also kind of want to combine Icon and Tags, because lots of people use both of those, but I know a lot of people wanted tags to have its own box last time so I won't argue too hard for it. And the Status box is confusing too, I think that might do better integrated into the rest of the page. That's one that really shouldn't need to be collapsed.

I like the functionality of the icon box, it's perfect except: the icon pop-up window is probably not aimed at me and I probably won't use it much, but I still found it infuriating that I can't select an icon and press enter, or double-click it, but I have to go down and press select. It's a tiny button far out of the way of the icons, and I don't want to have to deal with it.

The 50 characters left thing bugs me too, I think just because it is stated as imposing a restriction. It's jarring every time I look at it, possibly because it's not in character for Dreamwidth. And when I first saw it, I took it to mean you could only have 50 characters' worth of tags, which was rapidly disproved by experimentation but still. Try just having the number, with hover-text explaining that each tag can be up to 50 characters?

I do love the permalink, and can't think of any problems associated with it! Yay!

I agree that the Post--Delete bar should be flipped around, and also moved to right under the entry box so that it doesn't get shoved out of the way if you do have all your boxes open. You could add Save or Preview in there too without causing problems in my opinion. Alternatively you could just add Delete and Post to the Status box and then it would make more sense. I do miss the automatic toggle between Post and Save a little bit, but I understand why it went.

I also really liked the look of that one mockup I've seen links to all over, FWIW. Except I think 'reduce animations' is a perfectly good phrase, don't change it.

I still notice the problem where expanding the text box by the corner (possible in browsers other than Firefox), which would otherwise be a highly cool feature, results in expanding it behind the boxes on the right, rather than moving them like it should.

I guess the sum of all this is that I want the entry box to be a larger proportion of the screen; this is not exactly the same as saying I want it bigger.

[tatsuyes]

thanks for this!