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

[delight]

Oh, I love the new update page.

[helens78]

The newest mockup of the update page looks fantastic. *flails a bit* Things I especially like: tags having its own box, currents in a box where I can collapse it and fugeddaboutit, access/who can comment over on the left hanging out together, and something I did not even realize I wanted until I saw it: the preview of the permalink URL. OMG. That would be so great.

I wouldn't mind more robust options for scheduled posts, though -- is that planned? Every six weeks, every X number of days, every other month, etc. would be nice.

[ilyena_sylph]

The preview of the Permalink URL is wonderful. I squeed when I saw it, and didn't even know I'd wanted it!

[senmut]

OMG IT IS BEAUTIFUL AND I LOVE IT!

To everyone working on the update page, THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR EFFORTS!

[flick]

I'm sure I'm just being whingy, but I still find the new page to be very busy and cluttered. Will collapsing the various boxes be remembered from post to new post?

[zvi]

I know we've been told that it will be remembered, but one thing that was not clarified was whether the open/closed settings would be remembered on a per account basis or on a per browser basis....

[baggyeyes]

The Update Mock-up looks terrific. The layout looks much easier (for me) to navigate.

re: update page

[ilyena_sylph]

OH MY GODS, ILY'ALL *SO MUCH*.

This look so slagging awesome.

*runs off to play*

[elfin]

The new update page looks great! Love that it'll remember which boxes to collapse.

It might be that I'm a bit sleepy and am remembering things wrong, but didn't the last demo have a section that saved multiple drafts at once? It that here and I'm missing it or did I imagine that?

[denise]

The "status" box (in the upper right) is what governs that -- if you're creating a new entry, if you set that to 'draft' the 'post' becomes 'save'. The section where you manage multiple drafts is being spun off onto its own page, since people found it too cluttered to have it on the update page proper.

[jumpuphigh]

Notes on the mock-up:

-Only 50 characters for tags seems restrictive. I just scanned my first page of posts and the longest tag series has over 100 characters and that is in a personal journal. I've seen the need for many more tags in communities.
-How will the "display date" box interact with the "scheduled publishing" box?
-Something that explains what "reduce animations" means would be extremely helpful.

[helens78]

If it helps at all, that 50 character limit seems to start over with every new tag you type (so you can have well over 50 characters' worth of tags within the box; each tag that's in the box no longer counts toward the limit). However, I don't know how that interacts with tags that are themselves over 50 characters long!

[cheyinka]

The new update page is beautiful! I remember being somewhat hesitant with the last one, and figuring I'd come to like it since nearly everyone else was so enthusiastic, but this one I can be totally enthusiastic about myself. I'm not even sure what's different, but something is, and it's a good something!

(Also, the custom access groups made me giggle.)

[darkemeralds]

First--sorry about your shower, and I'm so glad that the fantastic DW team holds itself to a tighter schedule of accomplishment than your plumbers.

The new posting interface is looking good. Here's one note: I click on the link to the right of the icon, and bring up the selection of my icons (which I love, by the way). I select my icon visually by clicking on it. The icon tags appear...and then nothing happens.

I would have expected either a) that the selection page would disappear and my selected icon would show on the main page or b) that some kind of OK,Go button would appear which, on being clicked, would make the selection page disappear.

I'm using Chrome for Windows, jsyk.

Awesome developments! Thank you so much.

[hope]

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

Either way, thanks for the feedback :)

[quinara]

Love a lot about the new update page (hurrah for the collapsibility of stuff I never use), but I've got to say that I really don't like how narrow/small the update box is. You can't see much of what you're posting as it is on the update page, and with this version that's reduced even further. All the posting options etc. are nice, but to me they're peripherals taking up more screen estate than my entry's actual content, which is kind of the reason I go to the update page. Seeing so many buttons but so little text is quite frustrating for me to look at. (Also, I don't know if this is a change from before, but I'm so used to the 'post' button being on the right! That 'delete' button feels like it's in a very odd place.)

[helens78]

Oh, goodness, I hadn't really even noticed the placement of Post Entry/Delete at the bottom, but I agree, I'd find Post Entry much more intuitive on the right (with Delete on the left).

[auroraprimavera]

The update page is looking awesome. I want it now! Congrats to everyone working on it - really great job there. \o/

[ratcreature]

I like the update page look. It'll take a bit to get used to the columns, but I'm looking forward to the drafts a lot.

[renne]

will have to check out the new update page when i'm not on my phone, but just a quick question about the tickbox for updating time when entry is posted. If you select it will it always be selected? Because i would have thought the time autoupdating should be the default state, not something you should have to choose (as is the same right now). i know I'D prefer it as the default state for my posts (i had a gm script that did it automatically on lj). Because i want the posts i make to show up on my friends' pages WHEN i post it, not lost a page back because i've spent four hours making the post between annoying the cats, eating and getting distracted by that shiny new thing i just saw.

[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.

[alexseanchai]

Oooo SHINY.

[markmanching]

and awesome update entries mockups too!

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[ex_rising236]

One little thing that I noticed on the mock-up.

Selecting a icon, it would be nice to have textual links for 'random' and 'browse' as an option instead of the little icons. If that was made possible (and maybe have the two textual links for those options beneath the drop-down list, or something) I'd be thrilled.

Also, I'd be curious to see a mock-up done for how it'll look in either of the gradation site-schemes.

[sophinisba]

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