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

[sophie]

Right, I promised a lot of feedback for this page to Fu, so here's my comment!

First off: I, like everybody else, love this new mockup. But I agree with some others that this page is very cluttered. I'd also love to be able to move the boxes around so that they're where *I* want them to be. (I also want a pony.)

Tags: It's already been mentioned here that the update page makes it look like you can only have 50 characters total for the tag list, rather than 50 characters for each tag. The problem here is the "Tags (comma separated):" text, as it makes it look like the text box is supposed to contain all of your tags separated by commas (as it does in the current version). Instead, the text box is used only to add a new tag, and the tag is transformed into an uneditable 'tag box' when the comma key is pressed, or you move out of the text box.

To fix this, it might be good to change that text to say something like "Add tag (use comma for more):", but that isn't the clearest text ever.

Also, I want to echo what people have said about the uneditability of the 'tag boxes'. While it's nice to be able to delete them, it makes editing the text quite tough. Also, I like how hitting BACKSPACE once will highlight the tag you're about to delete if you press it again, but if you decide you don't want to do it after all, there's no way to do that with the keyboard short of pressing TAB, which logically would go to the next field but actually goes to what's visually the *same* field. You should be able to cancel a highlighted BACKSPACE by just typing, which would unhighlight the tag and start on a new one.

Icons: There's no title text on the two small buttons next to the entry icon for the icon browser and the random icon selector. There should be, because while there's alt text, it doesn't help sighted people to know what the buttons are meant to do. We need to be able to hover over things like that and find out what it means.

Preview/Post/Delete buttons: I tried to pretend-use this page to make an entry (knowing that it wouldn't work) and when I went to post it, I was about to hit the button when I realised I was hovering over the "Delete" button. I don't think it really makes sense for "Delete" to be there - and by a stroke of luck, I also don't think it makes sense for "Preview" to be in the Status section at the top. Why not swap the two around (so that you have "Save" and "Delete" buttons in the Status section) and then have Preview and Post both at the bottom-right (rather than the bottom-left and bottom-right)?

Scheduled Publishing: The "Today" button in the calendar picker doesn't work for me. It'd also be nice to have the date in this section labelled "Post on:" so that it's obvious you're not editing the display date.

Age Restriction: Does the "Reason" field apply if you choose "Journal Default" where the default is anything above "No Age Restriction"? (that is to say, can you override the Reason on the Journal Default setting?) If not, it should be hidden; and in any case it should be hidden when "No Age Restriction" is selected or when that's the journal default and it's on that setting.

Comments: Maybe change the "Send Email:" text to "Email Comments?" - otherwise it can be a little confusing as to what email it's referring to. (Yes, the section it's in makes it clear, but people don't want to have to look at section names :D)

If I come up with anything else, I'll let you know :D

[sophie]

Does it help that the tag system also looks in the middle of tags? So rather than typing, say, "harry potter: pairings: harry/draco", you could just type "harry/draco" (or even, as I would do, "y/d") and it would display the full tag which you could select?

[vanessagalore]

I agree with this. I found LJ very intimidating at first, and an extremely basic interface for newbies would have helped a lot (of course, I think DW is doing a lot more to make help pages that are actually 'helpful'). And now that I know what I'm doing, I'd really appreciate all the bells and whistles that you're offering with this redesign. I know it's a lot more work to have two interfaces, but DW has proven itself to be forward-looking and thoughtful about its client base, so I have faith you'll figure this out. (Just look at this post, for example, asking us to help you create something awesome.)

[sophie]

Hmm. So if I saved a draft, edited it to include the URL given in the preview, scheduled it to post in a week, and then made another proper post in the meantime, what would happen? Would the URL be valid?

[fu]

None of this is coded yet, so things may change! But that is the idea *G*

[unixronin]

Firefox 3.6.8 on Gentoo Linux (10.0 x86 desktop profile), 1920x1200 resolution, 1200x1160 browser window. Let me know if there's specific settings/configuration you need to know, I'll gladly provide whatever I can.

[lambchop_reads]

Of the good: Reduce animations is awesome, and for the most part, the layout is much more intuitively ordered.

Other thoughts:

* Too much white space, nothing draws my eye to the posting box as the centre of the page. I wonder if others find the page so cluttered because the entry box is not the biggest thing on the page by a large enough margin. It should dominate the page, and it doesn't.

* +1 on the switch post and delete. That's a hell of a mouse swoop to get to the post button.

* I find the Post as: and Post to: horribly confusing and frustrating with that bait and switch behaviour of the two areas occupying the same space. If I'm logged in under my sock account (like I am right now) and I want to post to a community from my main account, it looks like I have to choose the community in the to area first even though it's below the as area where I switch accounts which I have to do second. Um--arrrgh!!! is how that made me feel.

* I would toss the Security and Access over to the sidebar, make the Entry box longer and keep the Publishing under it. If you never ever change security and access, collapsing them doesn't give you any space that makes the page look less cluttered. It feels like a placebo collapse button.

* I honestly don't find the tag bubbles useful at all if I can't edit them. I really prefer the delicious autocomplete (with the usage count in the list) to any other tag system out there. Getting to the little x to delete these is precision mousing (which I suck at), but getting them highlighted and using the delete key doesn't work, which is not expected behaviour for a list of words. They're overdesigned in my opinion.

Oh, and please, please tell me that hitting enter while in the subject line will not post the entry.

[strangesequitur]

Thirding the permalink thing SO HARD.

[markmanching]

and awesome update entries mockups too!

[order_of_chaos]

*grins* I think I like it! Especially the tag-thing of awesomeness.


Wishlist of tiny things:

Mouse-over text for the choose icon and random icon buttons

To be able to double-click to select an icon from the choose icon box

To be able to double-click in the tags box to see a list of all my tags, without having to type in a letter first

To be able to edit the tag-bubbles directly rather than having to close them and create new ones in event of spelling mistakes

Some (or even all) of the options closed by default - I found three solid columns of options a bit daunting at first, and only realised how much I liked the new page when I scrolled back down after closing half of them.

When I middle-click over a link to open a new tab, I get the "you have unsaved changes, are you sure you want to leave the page" warning, despite the fact that I'm not actually trying to leave the page. My new tab doesn't open until I've clicked OK.

[ex_nicole7]

New update page is a winner.

[alexseanchai]

Yeah, that's the shiny.

[ilyena_sylph]

Okay, I know I saw this being discussed, but now I can't find it.

I just got the red-screen-of-flashing-evil when I was trying to collapse some of the various boxes -- and that was, like, actually deeply painful. I still love it, it's still awesome.

Although yeah, I've got to agree with people that the tags in the boxes are kind of evil, I like the lists so much better. But, all things considered, that's minor.

[zaluzianskya]

The tags in the boxes could probably be done better -- they look nice and neat, but they can't be edited, only deleted, which I don't like.

I think there should be textual links for the icon browser and random icon things, instead of the cute little pictures. Text would just be more intuitive. Also... is that icon browser only for the update page, or is it going to replace the current icon browser we have in comments, too? I don't like it D:

Somehow it seems to me that "Scheduled posting" should go under "Display date", but with currents above that it wouldn't really fit. What I would REALLY love is the ability to move the boxes around to our liking.

I love the way it looks, btw. I showed the page to a friend of mine who's not a DW user, to see if there was anything weird or confusing to her, but she didn't have any complaints. (Am aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I wanted to share that.) Keep up the good work!

[order_of_chaos]

Added to add: I take back my assumption that there was no mouse-over text for the icon options. Hadn't realised that the mock-up doesn't work quite right in Google Chrome. And that third column apparently goes up the side - that's better, too.

[charmian]

Hmm, maybe there could be a 'simple' mode as well? With only like the top five or so features used in the interface?

[stealth_noodle]

This is a really good point! I've been excited about all the collapsible bits and extra functionality, but I've also been kicking around LJ and its code-sharers for eight years and am the sort of person who will cheerfully spend half an hour setting and tweaking software preferences. If I were just starting out, this update page would terrify me.

A stripped-down basic update page as the default for new users would be much friendlier. Or if there were some way to hide most of the boxes by default and give users the option of displaying just the ones they want (not just collapsing/expanding, but full-out removing/adding), that would be really neat! Perhaps not actually feasible, but neat.

[feathertail]

What if the interface was modular, sort of like how your DW layout is right now? Except easier to use. You could have the basics in a basic module right off the bat, and could drag-and-drop other modules in or leave them out as you saw fit.

[charmian]

Oh, like the Wordpress widget page? that would also be good. I'd personally also like to be able to make it one-column, but that's sort of a tall order.

[bell]

Yep, me too!

[hope]

The right column falls to below the entry textarea when your browser gets narrower than 1024 pixels - does this seem to explain the issue you were having with the column not displaying along the right? (I've tested it in Chrome on my Mac here and it seems to be behaving as expected).

[instantramen]

+1 OMG. That would make it so much less of a hassle to create links to spots within the post.

[erebus_x]

I really like how the tags look. It makes it so much easier to remove a tag.

Apparently we're an emotionally stable bunch here: we've stayed at "amused" for a week now!

[jazzfish]

General: Very nice. It's obvious that a lot of care went into this. The userpic chooser in particular is a thing of beauty.

Post/delete: agree about wanting them a) right under the entry text (possibly repeated under the options) and b) switched around so that Post is all the way on the right. Delete's a not-so-often-used thing in any case; should it perhaps be, I dunno, in a module or something?

Tags: is it possible to have a Big Long List Of Tags in some fashion? I find that easier than typing them out, personally.

"Update time when entry is published" : 1) this is one that I'd really like to see as having the default changeable by users. 2) On LJ when this is selected, the date and time fields are greyed out and automatically updated with the current date and time. Possible here?

In general: I agree with the sentiment that there needs to be at the very least a "basic" option. Even with all the modules closed it can be overwhelming to less technical users ("aah there are all these things what do they do" is a scary thought even when you do end up just leaving them all set at whatever the default is). Maybe have many of the modules invisible to start with and some sort of control panel to make them appear if you want them?

In general: <3

[chaosraven]

I'm just going to agree with the people who say it's probably overwhelming to new users. There is a lot of stuff there that is only rarely going to be messed with and for people who are just starting or want only the bare bones, many of those boxes are superfluous.

I find the location of post and delete to be counter-intuitive. I would also like them a little bit closer together. If I recall, they were moved apart originally to make it less likely to hit one on accident? Which I think is good. But maybe have them 1/3 and 2/3 of the way in instead of at opposite ends.

I don't particularly have an issue with the size of the text box for the entries, but I do agree that it would be nicer to have all the various boxes on a level below the text box, instead of having some on the side. It could even be some on top, some on bottom the way the post entry page is set up now. A single column just works a lot better for me.

I hope any of that is helpful and I look forward to the next iteration.