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.

[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?

[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?

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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]

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!

[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.

[auroraprimavera]

(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.)

Same here!

[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....

[distractionary]

My experimentation seems to reveal that the 50-character limit is per tag, not for all tags together – when you're typing and add a comma, the countdown resets to 50 again.

[quinara]

*nods* I can foresee myself deleting a lot of entries that way... (Of course, I can be so slow that part of me wouldn't mind some green/red colour-coding to make everything extra clear!)

[janinedog]

I agree with you about how it seems like the options completely overwhelm the main point of the page (the entry text box). I honestly think there's too many options for people who are not used to DW/LJ...or at least, they're too in-your-face. Maybe if most of the boxes (I'm thinking everything except icon, tags, security level, and journal to post to) were hidden by default? I'm not sure if it's going to remember which boxes were expanded per-user (I'm assuming it will), so maybe if it's the first time the user has visited the new page, almost everything is collapsed. Then they can expand whatever they want, and it'll remember that for the future.

I do like it for the most part, though! And I'm excited to get something better than what we have now. :)

[denise]

It will, yes, and I'm pretty sure it'll be on a per-account basis.

[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.

[denise]

They can't be :) Tags have always had a 50-character limit, it's just that previously they were silently truncated.

[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.