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

[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.

[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.

[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).

[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.)

[hope]

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

[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.

[sophie]

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.

Actually, Chrome is doing it right. If the other browser you tried it in was IE, then you should know that IE does it *wrong* - it's displaying the alt text, which is meant to be used for those who can't see the images for whatever reason (using screen reader, turned images off, using a text browser, etc). Text that's supposed to be in a mouse-over tooltip goes in the TITLE attribute, not the ALT attribute. So it's not Chrome's fault :)

[turlough]

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

Yes, yes, yes! I agree completely with this!