Entry tags:
Progress Report: 30 March 2009
OMG, guys, we've got so much stuff to tell you this week, I can't even figure out where to start.
No, wait, I know where to start:
1. OMG OPEN BETA LAUNCH
Dreamwidth Studios will be launching to open beta on:
Thursday, April 30, 2009
The site will open for account creation and paid account sale in the evening (EDT) of April 30. (We don't know an exact time yet; we'll let you know that as soon as we decide.) At that time, you'll be able to create an account one of two ways: by getting an invite code from another user, or by purchasing a paid account.
For our first six months of operation, paid accounts will cost $25 for 12 months, $13 for six months, $5 for two months, and $3 for one month. Premium paid accounts -- all of the paid features at higher limits -- will cost $40 for 12 months and $20 for six months. (After the first six months, the prices will rise to $35/year for paid accounts and $50/year for premium paid accounts; the first-six-month discount is to reflect that things will still be imperfect during open beta.) All prices are in USD.
2. OMG SEED ACCOUNTS
We will be selling a limited number of seed accounts, which are functionally equivalent to premium paid accounts but which will never expire, at launch. 200 of them will go on sale as soon as we open for account creation, and 200 more of them will go on sale 12 hours later (this is so that our friends in non-US timezones don't have to get up in the middle of the night to buy one). They will cost $200 USD.
We had originally expected these to sell very, very slowly, recognizing that they are expensive and our service is yet unproven. Some of the feedback we've heard since then is making us think that they're going to sell out a lot faster than that. While we think this is awesome, there are also a few possible misconceptions I'd like to clear up. I've seen a lot of people saying that they want a Dreamwidth paid account but can't afford the $200! Fear not, that's not your only option.
* We're selling Seed accounts at launch in order to fund our initial year of operations. We're a lot more comfortable if we *know* that we have the $80,000 we've estimated will be our first year of operating costs on hand up front, so we can spend our first year building a kickass product and not worrying if we're going to be able to pay next month's hosting bill.
* Seed accounts are functionally equal to the Premium Paid level of service. There are absolutely no benefits, perks, or abilities a Seed account will receive that a Premium Paid account won't -- the only difference is that a Seed account will last for the life of the service. (So, it'll take four years at regular prices to "earn out" a Seed account payment; the price of a Seed account is four years of Premium Paid service.)
* For the health of the service, we need people to buy Seed accounts, true -- but we also need people to buy paid accounts as well. When a service sells permanent accounts, they're privileging short-term revenue over long-term sustainability, which can backfire in a lot of ways. It can also make people who buy those accounts think that the service has stopped listening to them, because they don't have the ability to vote with their pocketbook and stop paying if the service does something to annoy them. We don't want to trip those issues, so we're limiting the number of Seed accounts we sell to the number we think we'll need to sell, in order to finance our first year of operations.
* You don't need to buy a Seed account in order to get an account on Dreamwidth without an invite code. Any paid account at all, even the one-month basic paid account option for $3 USD, will be enough to bypass the need for an invite code, and if you choose to allow your paid account to expire after that, you'll be able to continue using it as a free account; you won't need an invite code to keep it.
* Paid accounts and Seed accounts will go on sale at the same time. Paid accounts will always be available. Seed accounts will be available for sale until they're sold out.
We are building Dreamwidth with an emphasis on long-term sustainability and careful growth (which is the reason why we are using invite codes -- they will allow us to control the ratio of free users:paid users, which will help us better allocate resources and make sure we're not overpromising our services). As part of that, we believe it's our responsibility to create a business model that relies on slow, steady, and reliable income rather than quick bursts of cash.
If you're hesitating at all about whether or not to buy a Seed account, don't. We would much, much rather earn your trust, and your regular payments, over time. It's better for you, and it's better for us in the long term.
3. OMG INVITE CODE GIVEAWAYS
As we're getting closer to our open-beta launch, we'll be expanding our closed beta via invite code giveaways. This is for several reasons:
* To have a wider, more diverse base of people at open-beta launch that we can give invite codes out to and let them start bringing over their networks;
* To do basic load testing to make sure that things don't start falling over with regular use;
* To get fresh sets of eyes on the project to make sure all of our flaws and bugs (because of course there are flaws and bugs!) are properly logged and recorded for fixing.
How are we going to be giving away invite codes? Well, there are lots of ways!
* We'll be randomly giving invites to members of our main, non-specialist mailing lists -- dw-discuss, dw-progress, dw-launch -- since by signing up to one of those mailing lists, you've indicated that you're interested in the project;
* We'll be giving invite codes to our existing beta testers for them to give out however they'd like, to reward them for their contributions;
* We may be giving invite codes to people who have set up OpenID accounts on Dreamwidth and started participating on the service (as long as they've set and validated an email address -- we need to know where to send the invite, after all!)
So, starting this week, as long as you're a member of one of our mailing lists or have an OpenID account on Dreamwidth, you may randomly get a Dreamwidth invite code. And when we say random, we mean random -- we'll be using a random number generator so we don't accidentally bias the choice.
4. OMG FINDING KNOWN ISSUES
With the expansion of the closed beta, we're seeing a number of people running into our bugs and flaws and wondering how to report them. Please don't ever worry about bothering people. We'd rather hear about an issue for the 50th time than not hear about it at all.
Right now, the best way to check if an issue's been reported is in our bug tracker:
Dreamwidth Bugzilla
Putting some search terms in the box and hitting "Find" will give you any open bug containing that search term.
It's possible that the bug's been fixed already, but the fix hasn't been pushed live on the site. To see all items containing your search term, even if they've been resolved already, put the word ALL as the first word of your search.
You can see a list of fixes that have been checked in, and see whether they're live or not, here:
Dreamwidth Code Status
If you can't figure out what to search for, we're also maintaining a list of Bugzilla tickets that reflect user-facing issues here:
Wiki: Known Issues
(It may be slightly out of date at any given time, as someone needs to manually copy things over.)
Things that have been reported by our beta testers, as opposed to things that we noticed ourselves, that were noticed by members of our site copy team, or noticed by our additional invitees are being tracked in the dw_beta community:
dw_beta
If you've noticed something that doesn't work right -- such as an error message, something not saving, something displaying wrong, etc -- notify
domtheknight so our beta testers can work on reproducing it and writing a bug report. Until we get a formal suggestions process in place, if you notice something that's working, but you think it should work differently, for now you can contact me and
mark or leave a comment here (or any other
dw_news post). (Our answer might be "yes, I'd like to change that eventually, but we can't prioritize it yet", or "no, we don't think that making that change would be a good idea, and here's why", but we'd still like to hear it.)
5. OMG CODE BY THE NUMBERS
We resolved 34 bugs this week, of which 24 were fixed with a patch and 10 were either duplicates or invalid reports. There are another 29 patches waiting for review-and-checkin.
We're currently at 43 blocking-open-beta bugs, and only 27 of them don't have patches awaiting code review. Most of the remaining things are little fixes that we consider vital to have in place before open-beta launch. At the moment, the major things we're still working on before open beta launch are:
* Styles (although see next item!)
* Crossposting:
allen has uploaded the first iteration of his patch for review, and we'll be working to get that finished soon.
* Payment system:
mark and
janinedog are taking the existing, barebones payment system that
mark wrote a while back and enhancing and extending it.
* Content importer: The feature is nearly entirely feature-complete, but we need a pretty frontend for it.
We're also working on our admin/policy pages, so that when you move in with us, you'll be able to find out anything you want to find out about how we handle all of the aspects of the business end of things.
6. OMG STYLES
So, if you've loaded any previously-blank-white styles in the past day, you've probably noticed: We have a style now! The styles team has finished porting our first style,
phoenix's Negatives. It won't necessarily be our default style in the future -- it was the easiest style for the team to port first, but we'll be adding more over the next few weeks -- but we're all really excited that we've finally been able to move off of the bare core2 and start seeing some of the pretty.
This doesn't mean that the styles team is finished -- for instance, the customization wizard is not entirely finished yet -- but it's an awesome step forward. For more information on this process, you can check out the dw_styles community:
Updates, updates, updates (we have a style!)
7. OMG SITE SCHEMES
Thanks to
branchandroot, we've added three new site schemes, with more to come. Here's my profile viewed in all three:
Blueshift
Celerity
Gradation Vertical
(As the name implies, we'll also have a Gradation Horizontal as soon as I can get the coding finished for it.)
None of these site schemes are yet available on the Display tab of your account settings -- we need to work out which ones we're going to have as an explicit option, figure out how we're going to handle having multiple sitescheme options, do thumbnails, and all the other things around fixing up the usability -- but you can view them now by adding ?usescheme=foo (or &usescheme=foo if there's already a ?something in the URL) to the end of a Dreamwidth URL.
These site schemes are also in the dw-free branch of our code, not the dw-nonfree branch, so any other site running the Dreamwidth code will be free to use them. (Tropospherical, our default site scheme, is in the dw-nonfree branch, because it's our default visual identity, but we wanted to give other sites some pretty options as well.)
8. OMG SITE COPY
Our site copy team, led by
rho, has begun their work to update and modernize all of the text on the site. Despite having to fight with the translation system to do so -- and really, mere words cannot describe how much of a shambling horror of the deep the translation system really is -- they've already rewritten (or determined that no rewriting is necessary) 1335 translation strings. That's about 1/6th of the way done. (No, don't ask what a translation string is. The answer involves lots of helpless pointing at the translation system's shambling horror.)
While they're at it, they're also keeping track of what translation strings are in the codebase but aren't used anywhere, so we can get rid of those for cleanup purposes, and finding instances where a small code change would make the resulting text better (by including a logged-in user's username, for instance). All of this contributes to making both the codebase and the user experience even better.
rho's already informed that if I don't give the site copy teams massive props in the update, she'll track me down and beat me. While this might not be much of a deterrent, rest assured I was already planning on singing the site copy team's praises.
9. OMG FAQS
Meanwhile, our user documentation team, also led by
rho, has been doing great work on our FAQs, which are designed to provide quick answers to questions, and our Guides, which are designed to walk people through everything they need to know about an issue. They're still working, and some things aren't documented yet (mostly because the feature isn't done yet -- it's hard to document a moving target!), you can still see examples of their work:
Dreamwidth FAQ
A good example of what kind of content will go into Guides is
greg's guide to privacy on Dreamwidth:
How do I protect my privacy on Dreamwidth?
Down the road, we're going to make improvements to our FAQ display and management system (and by 'improvements', I mean we're probably going to rip it out, jump up and down on it a few times, and then throw it out the window and replace it with something else), but until then, the doc team is doing a great job at bending the existing system to their evil wishes.
10. OMG DATACENTER
We've been working with our hosting provider, Slicehost, to make sure that they'll be ready to handle our technical needs. Last week, we came to the mutual conclusion that the existing datacenter we were in (St. Louis) was not the best choice for us, and this weekend we moved to their Dallas/Fort Worth datacenter.
We did the necessary work to make the switchover last night, and aside from
mark starting out the migration process by accidentally getting chili sauce in his eye, it went fairly smoothly. Hello, DFW! We'll be there with Slicehost until we hit the traffic and income level where it makes sense for us to purchase our own hardware and colocate. (We want to do that as soon as possible, but until then, using Slicehost means that we'll be able to be incredibly responsive to the requirement for additional hardware and bandwidth, as Slicehost lets us add additional servers very quickly and with minimal hassle.)
For all of your Dreamwidth maintenance needs, keep up with the dw_maintenance community:
dw_maintenance
For news while we're down, we use our Twitter feed for offsite status:
@dreamwidth on Twitter
11. OMG COOLHUNTING
zvi is beginning to assemble the Dreamwidth Cool-Hunting Army: people who observe how people are using the site and notice what's hard to do, what should be easier, what people are doing that's really cool, and how we can facilitate that.
If you're doing something on Dreamwidth that you think should be easier, you can leave a report:
Drive By Cool Reporting
If you're interested in becoming one of the Cool Hunters, the way to do it right now is to leave reports with useful ideas and suggestions to that community, since that'll show us that you have a good idea of what Dreamwidth's vision is and what kind of tools and features we're looking to add. So start looking for good ideas!
12. OMG TALK TO US
For brainstorming, questions, and discussion, you can join the dw-discuss mailing list.
For once-daily (more or less) updates on what-we-did-today, check out our Dreamwidth Twitter account.
For more real-time discussion, commentary, brainstorming, storytime, and the ability to consign things to hell -- or at least to our irc bot "hEll" -- come join us in irc:
irc.dwscoalition.org, port 6667, channel #dw
*
Questions? Comments? Complaints that I should have the letters "OMG" removed from my keyboard? Email Mark and me at the_bosses@dwscoalition.org, or comment here.
We'll see you next week for our next update!
No, wait, I know where to start:
1. OMG OPEN BETA LAUNCH
Dreamwidth Studios will be launching to open beta on:
Thursday, April 30, 2009
The site will open for account creation and paid account sale in the evening (EDT) of April 30. (We don't know an exact time yet; we'll let you know that as soon as we decide.) At that time, you'll be able to create an account one of two ways: by getting an invite code from another user, or by purchasing a paid account.
For our first six months of operation, paid accounts will cost $25 for 12 months, $13 for six months, $5 for two months, and $3 for one month. Premium paid accounts -- all of the paid features at higher limits -- will cost $40 for 12 months and $20 for six months. (After the first six months, the prices will rise to $35/year for paid accounts and $50/year for premium paid accounts; the first-six-month discount is to reflect that things will still be imperfect during open beta.) All prices are in USD.
2. OMG SEED ACCOUNTS
We will be selling a limited number of seed accounts, which are functionally equivalent to premium paid accounts but which will never expire, at launch. 200 of them will go on sale as soon as we open for account creation, and 200 more of them will go on sale 12 hours later (this is so that our friends in non-US timezones don't have to get up in the middle of the night to buy one). They will cost $200 USD.
We had originally expected these to sell very, very slowly, recognizing that they are expensive and our service is yet unproven. Some of the feedback we've heard since then is making us think that they're going to sell out a lot faster than that. While we think this is awesome, there are also a few possible misconceptions I'd like to clear up. I've seen a lot of people saying that they want a Dreamwidth paid account but can't afford the $200! Fear not, that's not your only option.
* We're selling Seed accounts at launch in order to fund our initial year of operations. We're a lot more comfortable if we *know* that we have the $80,000 we've estimated will be our first year of operating costs on hand up front, so we can spend our first year building a kickass product and not worrying if we're going to be able to pay next month's hosting bill.
* Seed accounts are functionally equal to the Premium Paid level of service. There are absolutely no benefits, perks, or abilities a Seed account will receive that a Premium Paid account won't -- the only difference is that a Seed account will last for the life of the service. (So, it'll take four years at regular prices to "earn out" a Seed account payment; the price of a Seed account is four years of Premium Paid service.)
* For the health of the service, we need people to buy Seed accounts, true -- but we also need people to buy paid accounts as well. When a service sells permanent accounts, they're privileging short-term revenue over long-term sustainability, which can backfire in a lot of ways. It can also make people who buy those accounts think that the service has stopped listening to them, because they don't have the ability to vote with their pocketbook and stop paying if the service does something to annoy them. We don't want to trip those issues, so we're limiting the number of Seed accounts we sell to the number we think we'll need to sell, in order to finance our first year of operations.
* You don't need to buy a Seed account in order to get an account on Dreamwidth without an invite code. Any paid account at all, even the one-month basic paid account option for $3 USD, will be enough to bypass the need for an invite code, and if you choose to allow your paid account to expire after that, you'll be able to continue using it as a free account; you won't need an invite code to keep it.
* Paid accounts and Seed accounts will go on sale at the same time. Paid accounts will always be available. Seed accounts will be available for sale until they're sold out.
We are building Dreamwidth with an emphasis on long-term sustainability and careful growth (which is the reason why we are using invite codes -- they will allow us to control the ratio of free users:paid users, which will help us better allocate resources and make sure we're not overpromising our services). As part of that, we believe it's our responsibility to create a business model that relies on slow, steady, and reliable income rather than quick bursts of cash.
If you're hesitating at all about whether or not to buy a Seed account, don't. We would much, much rather earn your trust, and your regular payments, over time. It's better for you, and it's better for us in the long term.
3. OMG INVITE CODE GIVEAWAYS
As we're getting closer to our open-beta launch, we'll be expanding our closed beta via invite code giveaways. This is for several reasons:
* To have a wider, more diverse base of people at open-beta launch that we can give invite codes out to and let them start bringing over their networks;
* To do basic load testing to make sure that things don't start falling over with regular use;
* To get fresh sets of eyes on the project to make sure all of our flaws and bugs (because of course there are flaws and bugs!) are properly logged and recorded for fixing.
How are we going to be giving away invite codes? Well, there are lots of ways!
* We'll be randomly giving invites to members of our main, non-specialist mailing lists -- dw-discuss, dw-progress, dw-launch -- since by signing up to one of those mailing lists, you've indicated that you're interested in the project;
* We'll be giving invite codes to our existing beta testers for them to give out however they'd like, to reward them for their contributions;
* We may be giving invite codes to people who have set up OpenID accounts on Dreamwidth and started participating on the service (as long as they've set and validated an email address -- we need to know where to send the invite, after all!)
So, starting this week, as long as you're a member of one of our mailing lists or have an OpenID account on Dreamwidth, you may randomly get a Dreamwidth invite code. And when we say random, we mean random -- we'll be using a random number generator so we don't accidentally bias the choice.
4. OMG FINDING KNOWN ISSUES
With the expansion of the closed beta, we're seeing a number of people running into our bugs and flaws and wondering how to report them. Please don't ever worry about bothering people. We'd rather hear about an issue for the 50th time than not hear about it at all.
Right now, the best way to check if an issue's been reported is in our bug tracker:
Dreamwidth Bugzilla
Putting some search terms in the box and hitting "Find" will give you any open bug containing that search term.
It's possible that the bug's been fixed already, but the fix hasn't been pushed live on the site. To see all items containing your search term, even if they've been resolved already, put the word ALL as the first word of your search.
You can see a list of fixes that have been checked in, and see whether they're live or not, here:
Dreamwidth Code Status
If you can't figure out what to search for, we're also maintaining a list of Bugzilla tickets that reflect user-facing issues here:
Wiki: Known Issues
(It may be slightly out of date at any given time, as someone needs to manually copy things over.)
Things that have been reported by our beta testers, as opposed to things that we noticed ourselves, that were noticed by members of our site copy team, or noticed by our additional invitees are being tracked in the dw_beta community:
![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
If you've noticed something that doesn't work right -- such as an error message, something not saving, something displaying wrong, etc -- notify
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
5. OMG CODE BY THE NUMBERS
We resolved 34 bugs this week, of which 24 were fixed with a patch and 10 were either duplicates or invalid reports. There are another 29 patches waiting for review-and-checkin.
We're currently at 43 blocking-open-beta bugs, and only 27 of them don't have patches awaiting code review. Most of the remaining things are little fixes that we consider vital to have in place before open-beta launch. At the moment, the major things we're still working on before open beta launch are:
* Styles (although see next item!)
* Crossposting:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
* Payment system:
![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
* Content importer: The feature is nearly entirely feature-complete, but we need a pretty frontend for it.
We're also working on our admin/policy pages, so that when you move in with us, you'll be able to find out anything you want to find out about how we handle all of the aspects of the business end of things.
6. OMG STYLES
So, if you've loaded any previously-blank-white styles in the past day, you've probably noticed: We have a style now! The styles team has finished porting our first style,
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
This doesn't mean that the styles team is finished -- for instance, the customization wizard is not entirely finished yet -- but it's an awesome step forward. For more information on this process, you can check out the dw_styles community:
Updates, updates, updates (we have a style!)
7. OMG SITE SCHEMES
Thanks to
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Blueshift
Celerity
Gradation Vertical
(As the name implies, we'll also have a Gradation Horizontal as soon as I can get the coding finished for it.)
None of these site schemes are yet available on the Display tab of your account settings -- we need to work out which ones we're going to have as an explicit option, figure out how we're going to handle having multiple sitescheme options, do thumbnails, and all the other things around fixing up the usability -- but you can view them now by adding ?usescheme=foo (or &usescheme=foo if there's already a ?something in the URL) to the end of a Dreamwidth URL.
These site schemes are also in the dw-free branch of our code, not the dw-nonfree branch, so any other site running the Dreamwidth code will be free to use them. (Tropospherical, our default site scheme, is in the dw-nonfree branch, because it's our default visual identity, but we wanted to give other sites some pretty options as well.)
8. OMG SITE COPY
Our site copy team, led by
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
While they're at it, they're also keeping track of what translation strings are in the codebase but aren't used anywhere, so we can get rid of those for cleanup purposes, and finding instances where a small code change would make the resulting text better (by including a logged-in user's username, for instance). All of this contributes to making both the codebase and the user experience even better.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
9. OMG FAQS
Meanwhile, our user documentation team, also led by
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Dreamwidth FAQ
A good example of what kind of content will go into Guides is
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
How do I protect my privacy on Dreamwidth?
Down the road, we're going to make improvements to our FAQ display and management system (and by 'improvements', I mean we're probably going to rip it out, jump up and down on it a few times, and then throw it out the window and replace it with something else), but until then, the doc team is doing a great job at bending the existing system to their evil wishes.
10. OMG DATACENTER
We've been working with our hosting provider, Slicehost, to make sure that they'll be ready to handle our technical needs. Last week, we came to the mutual conclusion that the existing datacenter we were in (St. Louis) was not the best choice for us, and this weekend we moved to their Dallas/Fort Worth datacenter.
We did the necessary work to make the switchover last night, and aside from
![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
For all of your Dreamwidth maintenance needs, keep up with the dw_maintenance community:
![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
For news while we're down, we use our Twitter feed for offsite status:
@dreamwidth on Twitter
11. OMG COOLHUNTING
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
If you're doing something on Dreamwidth that you think should be easier, you can leave a report:
Drive By Cool Reporting
If you're interested in becoming one of the Cool Hunters, the way to do it right now is to leave reports with useful ideas and suggestions to that community, since that'll show us that you have a good idea of what Dreamwidth's vision is and what kind of tools and features we're looking to add. So start looking for good ideas!
12. OMG TALK TO US
For brainstorming, questions, and discussion, you can join the dw-discuss mailing list.
For once-daily (more or less) updates on what-we-did-today, check out our Dreamwidth Twitter account.
For more real-time discussion, commentary, brainstorming, storytime, and the ability to consign things to hell -- or at least to our irc bot "hEll" -- come join us in irc:
irc.dwscoalition.org, port 6667, channel #dw
*
Questions? Comments? Complaints that I should have the letters "OMG" removed from my keyboard? Email Mark and me at the_bosses@dwscoalition.org, or comment here.
We'll see you next week for our next update!