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

[cesy]

Regarding the confusing-for-new-users comments, how about if the default was to have all the option boxes collapse, and if they slide up on the right together if enough of them are collapsed?

[nishatalitha]

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

Possibly a dropdown menu of tags previously used under the option to create new tags? I like reusing tags, and I always forget the particular witty phrasing I used six months ago, so end up with ten very similar, but not quite identical tags.

[ten]

I love the new update page, and the only thing I personally encountered that annoyed me was the tag box becoming too wide when I shrink my browser and extending past the border of its section. Doesn't hurt its functionality, but looks 'buggy'.


I am wondering if maybe the feeling of being overwhelmed that some experience as well as the too small text field would be solved by moving all menus below the text field by default and stretching the text field to use the whole width, as well as adding a second Post, (Preview), Delete button row right below the text field.

Super quick and dirty mockup (horribly out of proprtion, but you get the drift, I think)

[order_of_chaos]

That does explain it, thanks! I had my screen width set to 2024 so everything wouldn't look tiny, and, assuming that my browser uses just slightly less than that, that makes sense. Still not sure why ie didn't do the same, though - I even opened it in a tab in Chrome. (I have Chrome and Windows XP. I have no idea if that makes a difference in this case.)

[pensnest]

I've been mulling over how I post, and for me, it would work better if all the collapsible boxes were in the right hand column. The majority of them will be given a default setting and left closed—I don't think I've ever fiddled with the Age Restriction, for instance—and they'd be a lot tidier in a neat stack to one side, leaving more room for a nice big posting box. As things are, it feels vaguely as though I am 'required' to go through all sorts of hoops I don't actually want to bother with, when I have to go down past all those options before I can hit Post. I suspect having a single column of pre-collapsed boxes set to sensible defaults would be less intimidating for newcomers, too.

It'd also be excellent if I could rearrange the boxes into whatever order makes sense for *me*, because my own prioritising doesn't quite match what's in this example page. In a really perfect world, I'd be able to rename any of those boxes, if I could think of a name that works better for me than the default—probably via a set-up page somewhere else, though!

I'd also be inclined to prefer the Post and Delete buttons to be one above the other, immediately below the Entry box—perhaps with Preview in the same mini-column. (Reading the comments here, I realised that I hadn't noticed the Preview box at all, and when I looked for it, it took me a long while to find it. Obviously, I'll get used to its new position wherever it turns out to be, but as it's a function I use a lot, I want it handy.)

[fortunadraken]

I agree in general with the swapping Post and Delete buttons, and I have to admit I'd also like them centred. Having them so far away from each other and down the bottom, while following the layout of the page nicely, makes them seem distant and almost detached from the page itself. The fact I also had to scroll down to find them I don't like. I kind of miss having the Preview button near the Post one. It's one of the things I use the most, and having it next to Post seems more logical. Delete is something I'd never probably use.

I admit, as soon as I opened the page my head went "...I do not like this and want my old update page back." It's kind of growing on me though...

Way too busy though. Too many things to look at, even with things closed.

I'd like an option where all those boxes STARTED closed when you opened the page, and then just opened what you needed. I mean, half of these I would never look at. I'd prefer them not being there, and just opening what I wanted. When I did want them, I can just open the boxes I need.

I like the tag bubbles, but they need a way to be edited. I keep trying to double click them to edit, maybe that?


My two cents. The thing with having boxes start closed is what I really, really want though.

[faevii]

Looks much better than the last one. :)

I'm with the "post button on the right" and "make collapsed boxes the default" crowds. I noticed that when I tried out the page, I instinctively found myself collapsing all of the boxes on the bottom because they distracted me. I may use them sometimes, but then I would probably just end up expanding them quickly to make my change and collapsing them again. I think it would be easier if all the red triangles weren't screaming "LOOK AT ME I'M IMPORTANT" though. Uhm ... how about making the section headers grey?

Also, regarding tags ... I've had a Tumblr account for several months now and I'm freaking fed up with their tags system. You make one little typo and have to delete the entire tag to correct it instead of just hitting backspace once or twice. This is especially fun if you then go on to make a different typo the second time around, so you have to start over again ... and again ... when the whole dilemma could be avoid by tags behaving like normal text! I like that your version isn't completely identical in that at least the annoying "Oops, I hit backspace twice and two tags disappeared!" problem doesn't occur, but I suggest more changes than that. I like the new way that auto-complete works, though.

Question: What does "save" mean? It would make sense in the context of a draft or editing and existing entry, but on this page I can't figure out what it's for.

[faevii]

Uh ... avoid=avoided, and=an. I'm usually better at proofreading than this, but I guess my subconscious wanted to show you evidence of how badly I need to be able to edit mistyped tags. ;)

[naraht]

Bigger box for composing entries is still right at the top of my priorities. That's what I'm here for, after all.

Maybe there should be an option for something like full screen mode, or another way to blot out most of the management boxes until after you've finished writing your post? Because right now it is just distracting.

[laitaine]

New update page? Is AWESOME like a very awesome thing.

Everything is so clear and grouped together sensibly and I can collapse all the things I don't use so I can better see the bits I do use, and the permalink url at the top is brilliant and the tag box is awesome! \o/

I love it!

[laitaine]

I WANT THIS. SO MUCH.

This is brilliant. I love the icon box at the top, it makes the whole thing look like an entry. And having the post and delete buttons below the entry for people who don't want to faff with any of the other settings is also brilliant (though I would centre those and put them together, possibly also with preview).

WANT WANT WANT. ♥

[laitaine]

I'm also being flashed by the red screen of doom, running FF on Solaris (unfortunately, crappy work machine!).

[lilmoka]

I love what you did with the new update page, it's even better than the first demo! :D

[jazzfish]

This makes sense, with the caveat that most of the time what people are going to want to do is hit Post. So maybe having the "Post" button and under it "Other things you can do with this post."

[hope]

Re: IE - IE6/7 doesn't support the "media query" CSS technique used to degrade the layout gracefully as the browser resizes, sadly :(

[bell]

Delete's a not-so-often-used thing in any case; should it perhaps be, I dunno, in a module or something?

I'd opt for Delete *not* being in a module because it has happened (I admit it!) that I accidentally posted the wrong thing and I need to delete it ASAP-- but my connection is slow so just to get the posting page to load takes a while. If I had to get the Delete button to load to, that, that'd be really upsetting! To me it's a button I need right-away, in an emergency, and I imagine other people with slow connections would feel the same way.

[sophinisba]

I agree that textual links for the icon options would be nice.

[sophinisba]

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. :(

This is true for me too. I'd really like more space for the entry text itself. (Which come to think of it is also why I dislike most Dreamwidth journal layouts - so many of them have two wide sidebars and only a narrow column for the actual text of the journal, which is what I'm here to read.)

[phoenixsong]

I was just going to ask the same thing. Especially with so many other new options on the new update page, could this be included too? I much prefer how Semagic datestamps at the time posted, but it's been years since I used a client, and I almost always update my datestamp (so easy now with a button!). Why can't it be a remembered checkbox like "don't autoformat"?

[sophinisba]

Ooh, yeah. I do use several of the options in that column regularly, but it would be really nice if things were arranged differently so it was possible to have more space for the entry text.

[axiom_of_stripe]

As a Chrome user, I'm accustomed to being able to grab the corner of a text box (such as the update box) and pull it out across the screen, and the floating right-hand column interferes with that unless my browser width is set just so:

* Too wide!
* Just right

If there were some way to force the display to never put the entry box in a column next to anything else no matter how wide the browser window was, that would be awesome.

[sophinisba]

Oh, I like that idea about putting the "save" and "delete" buttons together (they're both ones that mean "I don't want to post this now) and bringing "preview" down next to "post" since preview is the thing I actually want to do before I post.

Changing "send email" to "email comments" is also a good suggestion.

[order_of_chaos]

It only looked like it was working right in IE because it actually wasn't? *grins* Life continues never to fail to amuse me.

[ninetydegrees]

Ok my own version of this page and something I actually feel I could and would use:



It makes the page longer, moves some options out of boxes and puts them where people may not want them but I feel somebody who just wants to post a picture of their dog being adorable or quotes something their friend's just said can use it.

[jazzfish]

Fair enough! To me that's an argument for "Delete" being its own thing rather than part of the "update" page, but I'm not sure how one would go about that.