Weekly Update: 30 Sept

[denise]

Hullo Dreamwidth! It's another week, which means it's time for another weekly update, which means you get me in your inbox. Aren't you lucky?

Behind the cut is a plethora of DW news. This week's sections are:

* Development
* Code Push
* More DW Creativity
* RIP, Vox
* DW Advocacy
* Icon Renames

Development

This week's code tour host was Yours Truly, guiding you through a brief introduction to the 14 bugs we committed fixes for this week. Welcome this week to jld, who has contributed his first patch!

None of those fixes are live yet ... but they will be, which leads me to:

Code Push

We are still planning on a code push this Sunday evening (Eastern time). We'll let you know an exact time when we get closer.

The full list of fixes that will be in this code push are:

(Some of) 2010 July 23 to 2010 August 10
Aug 10 - Aug 19, 2010
20 August - 25 August
26th August - 1st Sept
1st - 8th September
9-9 to 15-9
2010 September 15 to 2010 September 21
22 Sept to 30 Sept

If you don't want to read through the full code tours, here's my collection of favorites that will be going in this push:

* Over 50 new themes and layouts to customize your journal.

* Rename tokens! You'll be able to rename your DW account to anything you want (assuming that the "anything you want" is a deleted & purged account or an unregistered account, or under your control). A full overview of the rename process can be found at the bottom of the 20 August dw_news update.

* Adding links to choose your page setup (ie, how many columns you want your journal to have) on the Customize Style page as well as the Select a Style page, where it is now.

* Fixes to previewing entries and comments to prevent the way that things are spaced and formatted weirdly. (I don't usually put bugfixes in this roundup, but this has been driving me stone flat insane since I first noticed it.)

* The "URL for community rules" -- which comm admins have been able to set for a while, in the Community Settings on the Manage Community page -- will now be available for all communities at a fixed URL: http://examplecommunity.dreamwidth.org/guidelines for examplecommunity, etc.

* Polls will be "AJAXified" -- you'll be able to submit your poll answers without having to leave the page you're on. (This was a Google Summer of Code project, and I'm so excited about it!)

* You'll be able to set a poll to "anonymous responses" -- all responses to the poll will display to you-the-poll-owner as coming from numbers, not usernames. It won't be perfect anonymity, since if someone comments right after they answer you might be able to guess who it was, but it's close! (Another GSoC result!)

* You'll be able to specify a number of tickyboxes for people to tick in a poll, so (for instance) you'll be able to say "choose no more than three answers", and the system will enforce it. (And another!)

* Various sections on the profile will have an anchor, so you'll be able to link directly to them (with, for instance, http://denise.dreamwidth.org/profile#blah.)

* There'll be a "collapse cut" button at the end of an expanded cut-tag, so you can re-collapse something you've expanded once you're done with it. (And it's smart enough to fold up the cut and then bring you back straight to the bottom of where you were reading, instead of keeping you alllll the way down where the expanded cut ended, too!)

* There's been a "random icon" selector on the Post an Entry page, but with the next push, there'll be one for comments, too! It picks a random icon for you, and then lets you change it before hitting 'submit' if it isn't appropriate. (You would not want to use your "You suck and that's sad" Happy Bunny icon on a post about a death in someone's family, for instance. Or maybe you would, you sick fuck, I dunno.)

* Another bugfix that's been driving me nuts: If you made a comment in reply to another comment, and then the parent comment was deleted, you couldn't edit your comment in reply (even if it hadn't been replied to). This is a bugfix from andy at LJ, since they had the problem too, and we are grateful to them for the bugfix!

* You'll be able to specify a default security for your remote crossposting sites, so that editing the entry locally won't change the security remotely as well. (This would only happen if your DW account was public and your remote account was locked: when you'd edit the DW entry and save it, the edit sent to the remote service would include "hey, this entry is public", and the remote security would be updated.) You'll set this on your crossposting preferences here on DW, and once you set it, the security on remote sites won't be updated to anything less permissive than the default security.

* We'll be setting the base font to all styles and layouts to 1 em. This will likely result in a change to how your journal displays -- 1 em means, in most browsers, "display in your browser's default font," but some browsers act weird. If your journal text gets huge after the code push, go to the Font tab of the Customize Journal page and select your preferred size. (If you have already set your preferred size, it shouldn't be overridden.) The reason we did this was for accessibility -- it's better to define your font size as the browser default, so that people with low vision, who have already set their default browser font to much bigger than the 'norm', can read the text.

This isn't all that will be going live in this code push -- there's tons of stuff, mostly minor bugfixes and little tweaks to make your DW experience that much better. Because of the volume of fixes going out in this code push, there might be a small amount of downtime, or some rocky moments, while we push -- but we will do our absolute best to minimize the disruption.

More DW Creativity

So, when mark and I started Dreamwidth, we wanted it to be a haven for creative people of all sorts. We knew that we'd mostly start with people who were writers in some fashion -- creative writing, essay writing, or people who journal about their day -- because all of the tools we had in place when we forked from LJ were concentrated on textual expression. People can find people who write things they want to read really easily on DW, thanks to our site search and the Latest Things page, but since the reading page is centered around text, it's hard to find people who are into visual arts or crafts that you'd like to see.

We do have a lot of things planned to increase the tools for all other sorts of arts and crafts -- from image hosting to expanding the definition of "reading page" so that images, video files, audio files, and more can be posted on their own instead of as part of a separate entry. (I know we've been slow to introduce them -- there's just so much we have to do!)

In the meantime, though, there are other sites out there that offer a great place to show off artwork and craft work, and I'd like to start collecting lists of DW users on those other sites (and creating DW teams or groups there) so we can show off how awesomely creative DW users are. Here are some that we've already started:

* Etsy: If you have an Etsy shop, leave the URL of your shop in comments to this entry. I'll collect them all, and every week I'll feature a Treasury collection to show off the awesomeness that is made by DW users. This week's Treasury is here: Dreamwidth Users, 9/30/10. (Disclosure: sarah and I are 'faultlesspajama'.) Once I see how many of you there are, I'll probably start up a "Team Dreamwidth", too, and contact everyone who's got an Etsy shop and invite you to join. (There's also etsy here on DW for discussion of all things Etsy!)

* Artfire: If you have an Artfire shop, leave the URL in comments! I haven't explored Artfire much, but I will come up with a way to collect the DW people from there, too.

* Ravelry: If you're on Ravelry, there's a Dreamwidth Knitters group! Unfortunately, I don't believe the groups can be made public, but if you're on Ravelry already, we'd love to have you in the group.

* Flickr: If you're on Flickr, we've just started a Dreamwidth Flickr pool. Join the group, and add your photos, or just browse others' photos and revel in the awesomeness that is the creativity of DW users.

Is there an arts or crafts site out there that I'm missing? (For instance, I know that DeviantART is popular -- do they have some kind of group thing?) Let me know in the comments, and I'll start up a DW group there, with associated promo code so people stumbling across the group/pool/team/whatever can create an account if they want.

RIP Vox

And speaking of promo codes, I'd like to take a minute to say goodbye to Vox, the (now-former) blogging platform from Six Apart. Mark and I were both working for Six Apart when they were making Vox, and a lot of the people I knew inside the company spent a lot of time and effort on trying to make Vox a success. It's a pity that we have to say goodbye to it now.

Welcome to everyone who came to Dreamwidth from Vox! I'm really sorry that we couldn't get a content import from Vox working in time to welcome you, but if you moved your content to TypePad or Wordpress, we do hope to offer import from both of those services in the future. We've had 844 accounts created from the special Vox promo code we gave out, and while I know that a lot of people were using it to move from elsewhere (not Vox in particular) or to create new journals, I've still seen enough people saying "Hey, I moved here from Vox" on the Latest Things page that I know we've had a bunch of Vox people move on over. So, welcome to you all, and I hope that DW can be a good new home for you!

DW Advocacy

And speaking of moving over to DW (my sections are blending nicely into each other this week!)...

Back when we were in closed beta, gearing up for the open beta launch, I made a page on the DW Wiki called Advocacy -- a set of guidelines for how people should promote the DW project, and the best ways to get the word out. Since then, I've linked to it here and there in the updates, but I'd like to ask everybody who talks about Dreamwidth to their friends to take a second and read it over to refresh your memory.

In the past few weeks and months, we've seen an increase in the number of people who are promoting DW as "the anti-LJ", or "better than LJ", or, in the most extreme examples, "the place you need to be because staying on LJ makes you an evil horrible person who probably kicks kittens when nobody's looking." This makes me really, really sad. I know that a lot of people have been really disappointed in the choices that LJ management have made lately, but nobody reacts well to the kind of pressure that I've seen some people using to try to get people to move to Dreamwidth, and it can cause people who haven't moved, for one reason or another, to really dig in their heels and refuse to even think about it.

Not to mention, positioning Dreamwidth entirely as "the place for disgruntled LJ users" stifles DW's growth in a lot of ways. If people think that DW is limited to LJ power users, or people who were on LJ and got fed up, that's going to turn a lot of people away. We want Dreamwidth to be a place where everyone feels welcome, no matter where they come from and what their experience is. By making a service with excellent tools for self-expression with a strong concentration on privacy and community, we think that we can appeal to everyone, not just to people who are coming from LJ -- and if you've noticed, we've been doing a lot of reaching out to populations of people who aren't from LJ, because we know that in order to survive, we need to have growth from everywhere.

So, if you want to help DW grow, the best thing to do is to tell your friends about all the positive things DW has and does -- not compare it to other services out there, and not make switching to DW into some kind of moral issue or something. (I mean, obviously we like to think that we're a moral company, but that doesn't mean that choosing to have an account here is on the level of a moral imperative!) And as a personal favor to me, I'd like to ask people to stop promoting DW so heavily in the comments to official LiveJournal communities. I've seen a lot of people on LJ saying that they'd never create an account here because of those comments, and that makes me really sad.

I'm not asking people not to promote Dreamwidth at all -- indeed, the best source of new, committed users is you guys, because when you bring your friends over, they automatically have at least one social connection, and the more social connections people have on a new-to-them service, the more likely they are to stick around! All I'm asking is for everybody to take a deep breath, think about what makes DW awesome, and tell people about that instead of telling them about how much other sites suck.

Icon Renames

As I mentioned last week, icon keyword names are temporarily disabled while we do some work to speed up the process. (It's what was partially causing the slowness and timeouts last week.) Because I've seen some confusion: you still can change the keywords on your icons, or add new keywords to your icons, on the Edit Icons page! What you can't do is make that change retroactive -- old posts and comments that use that keyword will revert to your default icon, not change to use the new keyword or icon.

We've worked out a way to speed up the whole thing, and after the next codepush, we'll be making the conversion. It will involve a brief period of read-only mode for each account as we make the change. We'll keep you up to date in dw_maintenance.

*

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.

And, finally, since this week is a celebration of DW users' creativity, I leave you with the DW logo woven out of seed beads -- or icon-sized -- by weaverbird aka Weaverbird Beads. She says the icon's free for the taking, with credit to Weaverbird!

We'll see you next week for our next update.

Comments

[ex_porches156]

What an awesome idea, about other sites where we show off our creativity. And it couldn't have come at a better time. I'm just getting ready to re-open/re-launch my etsy store!

You can find me here on etsy:
http://www.etsy.com/shop/yarnkitten

[ursamajor]

Awww, you're giving me and hyounpark a code push for our anniversary! ♥♥♥

And I just added some of my pix to the Dreamwidth pool! And I am ridiculously excited about AJAXIFIED POLLS and DEFAULT SECURITY FOR CROSSPOSTING and ALL THE SHINY THINGS and and and. Bestest anniversary present evar! ;)

[pinesandmaples]

Awww, you're giving me and hyounpark a code push for our anniversary! ♥♥♥

D'awwwwww. Happy (nearly) anniversary!

[helen_c]

We want Dreamwidth to be a place where everyone feels welcome, no matter where they come from and what their experience is.

I don't say this nearly often enough, but I kind of love you guys. Because of stuff like this.

Thank you.

[arethinn]

Rename tokens!

Woo! Not that mark didn't already rename my other account for me back in ummm March or April or whenever that meetup was, but still, cool!

will now be available for all communities at a fixed URL: http://examplecommunity.dreamwidth.org/guidelines

Hmm. I'd have thought /rules would be a good URL for that.

* You'll be able to specify a number of tickyboxes for people to tick in a poll, so (for instance) you'll be able to say "choose no more than three answers", and the system will enforce it. (And another!)

Yay!

We'll be setting the base font to all styles and layouts to 1 em. ... so that people with low vision, who have already set their default browser font to much bigger than the 'norm', can read the text.

YAY for layout in ems!!!! I may even add more exclamation marks. I keep my browser font cranked pretty high and usually I just have to live with horizontal scrolling (which is still preferable to coding which makes the right side of a text area simply chop off because some other page element is layered over it) and the fact that many websites don't degrade gracefully (absolute text positioning by pixels can go DIAF - it often results in very ugly, unreadable text-over-text effects).

[pinesandmaples]

Woo! Not that mark didn't already rename my other account for me back in ummm March or April or whenever that meetup was, but still, cool!

I was given a manual rename, too (because my original username was a BAD. IDEA.) so I'm going to buy a rename token for someone else to pay the kindness forward (and make sure DW gets some income).

[kookaburra]

My artfire shop is here: http://www.artfire.com/users/gumtreejewelry

doesn't have much in it, but I'm working on adding more - and thank you for remembering Artfire! So many people think that Etsy is the be all and end all of crafting on the internet, but there are soooo many more, (and better, IMO) options out there.

[pinesandmaples]

For me, Artfire : Etsy :: Dreamwidth : LJ.

(I'm on Artfire, too!)

[burn1ngcha0s]

One word to sum my thoughts up - nice~ Thumbs up for you, guys&girls :)

So far, when someone (from LJ) asks me about DW, I've just pointed out that the basic layout is simple so if you've even once been on LJ, you pretty much already know how stuff works, just a few minor differences. In the end, it's up to them if they want to join DW or not.


P.S. //You would not want to use your "You suck and that's sad" Happy Bunny icon on a post about a death in someone's family, for instance. Or maybe you would, you sick fuck, I dunno.// - I lol'd hard xD

[ilyena_sylph]

YAY, update!

And will you let us know once there's a DEVart group? I'll happily join.

[sneezer222]

I'm Sneezer222 on Etsy http://www.etsy.com/shop/Sneezer222

[garryowen]

Lots of awesome stuff this week! I love the font size modification and also the move to get more support for visual artists. Keep up the great work!

Since my paid time is about to run out

[jassanja]

do you accept Western Union transfers, or will I have to find a proxy payer?

Re: Since my paid time is about to run out

[denise]

We do not, unfortunately, take Western Union at the moment. (Maybe in the future!) We take Visa/Mastercard/American Express/Discover, checks in US funds, money orders in US funds, and -- if they arrive at the office, which isn't guaranteed -- American Express traveler's checks and US cash.

I know this is really, really inconvenient for people outside the US, and I'm really sorry. I did just check out Western Union's services, though, and it looks like they'll let you get a prepaid VISA debit card, which will work just like a credit card, only you preload it with how much you want to spend on it -- that might work for you without making you find a proxy. I don't know if they have them in your country, but if they do, it might be a heck of a lot easier for you than messing around with finding a friend you trust to relay the payment!

[blackmare]

Hm, what to do? I moved here because the looming threat of Facebook integration put me at risk of having Offline People, people in my professional life, discovering my personal journal (and the fanfic therein).

But my profession? Artist. I do have an Etsy shop as well as a website and blog, and I would love to share that with the DW crowd, but all my pro stuff is under my real name, so there's that issue again.

I might have to set up another account here just for the art.

Will come back and squee over other new goodies later when I am not confined to posting via iPod.

[denise]

That is tough, yes! If you want to private-message me with your Etsy shop link, I will add it to the list and never connect it with your DW account. (Mostly because as soon as I delete the PM, I will never remember who it came from.)

[defenestrated]

Thank you so much for all the awesome announcements, I am super excited. :D

If we don't have an Etsy or other craft account, but get one later, can we comment to this post with it, or on a future post...?

[denise]

This one, or a future one -- it doesn't really matter! I'm keeping a list of DW artisans, and I'll be making a corresponding list of DW visual artists at some point, I'm sure. It doesn't matter where you get the information to me, just get it to me somehow. :)

[aviekokyre]

These news posts and interacting with the users makes me feel warm and fuzzy. I've really noticed that since I joined a few weeks ago. I even look forward to them. Thank you for that.

I don't really have a creative site besides my InsaneJournal, where I've been posting/archiving my art and creative writings (mostly fan and RP related), but I have noticed that in exploring what communities are here, my original story muses have been re-awakened with a similar feeling of what I get around NaNoWriMo. That is an exciting feeling, and I wouldn't mind playing with that more.

[ex_2d96]

Hooray for new layout styles!

[armaina]

http://www.etsy.com/shop/Armaina
I sell mostly semi-precious stone jewelry. Mostly bracelets for now.

As far as the anti-LJ issue, I've seen that a lot, and yes, that has made me rather disdainful of DW, not of the site itself, but of the attitude of it's users. I also find it rather passive aggressive that users go out of their way to post with their DW ID's on LJ's news posts to further promote their dislike of LJ and how they hate it so much they have to use their DW ID just to show that they refuse to log back into their own accounts. Not to mention the constant comparisons between the two despite the fact that LJ and DW are on two completely different levels and can't be viewed exactly the same.

Now I don't think at all that DW as a group has any control over this so I'm not saying this because I'm hoping you'll do something about this, I'm hoping that other readers might see this and understand what it is their snide remarks and vindictive behavior is doing to DW as a community. I'm here because I'm sure there are more people beyond that, but there are many others that may not even try if people like this leave a bad taste in their mouth.

[necromantic]

Here's my etsy store :)
http://www.etsy.com/shop/ljenner

[marahmarie]

If I were to tell you, Denise, all the ways in which the code tour is going to make life on DW more awesome than before, it would take me half the night. And I have something waiting for me, so I can't. So let me just say thanks a million times over for the summer of code project and all the good things that have come out of it. And since this has been an issue for me in the recent past (*waves*), I would like to come clean right here and now and say I once was but no longer am a "This is the anti-LJ" promoter that you were talking about in your post. It's been months since I've tormented my former LJers with such dreck, so I can safely say now (I hope!) that I have reformed. :)

[dylan_dufresne]

(You would not want to use your "You suck and that's sad" Happy Bunny icon on a post about a death in someone's family, for instance. Or maybe you would, you sick fuck, I dunno.)


I LOL'd. I now have to clean my laptop screen. And it's all your fault.

[ingo]

I like the thought of more visual/textile arts here because I only discovered my ABSOLUTE LOVE for making things quite recently. It's something I do now my ability to write appears to have died on me. I'm Fifth Heaven on Etsy.

[winterthunder]

Lots of cool stuff in this update! *heads over to check out the etsy community*

I'm Written Insight on Etsy.

[florentinescot]

I'm an artsy type, but I don't do any of those communities -- I just post about it here. (I play in the SCA, so most of my artsy stuff is of a Historical Nature -- or embroidery. I don't make any of it to sell. Right now, I'm working on a couple of Viking Aprons .....

I've been vocal over there about the privacy holes. In this last post, I also made it a point to thank the two folks who made the "we're gonna fix it -- and we understand that you don't trust us" posts. I've actually contemplated making a comment on that entry just for that. Those two have been awesome. And I know their hands are tied.

LJ doesn't suck -- their management is just clueless -- or maybe they have a different set of priorities; I dunno. It's not the warm and secure place that it used to be. I don't want to have to make my journal Friends Only. On LJ it is. I won't give somebody the opportunity for an accident to happen. It's not that I don't trust them (but I have been betrayed by very best friend in the world), but I know that accidents happen. Ever used a laptop with a wonky touchpad? I have. That's too easy. And this is what I've said over there. Until they give me a journal-wide opt-out, so that nobody can accidentally cross-post something, comments are disabled over there. Lots of my friends haven't left -- and I've got a permanent account anyway. I've made some really awesome new friends over here -- and I'm forever greatful to LJ for this massive train=wreck. I wouldn't have run into them without it.

I like Facebook. I keep up with my family and my students on it. We're encouraged (institutionally) to use facebook. I don't mind it at all. However, I don't want my students following me over here! There's a couple of family members that I don't want following me over here. Crossposting ain't happening.

Thanks for the awesomeness that it this place! And you know, y'all have seen first hand what kinds of things NOT to do! (that's a little humor, there, son, I say a little humor! [I need a Foghorn Leghorn icon!])

[evilsusan]

Etsy! I sell ceramics there.

http://www.etsy.com/shop/ozonelouise

[turlough]

BEAUTIFUl stuff!

[modest]

I'm really excited about Dreamwidth connecting with Etsy and Flickr. As DW is so new, there don't appear to be many Blythe doll collectors on the site, and they're a community of great people who I think would enjoy this place. Since many Blythe enthusiasts post photos of their hobby on Flickr, and/or make amazing handmade doll clothing and accessories to sell on Etsy, I think this might give them more incentive to give DW a try. I'd love to be able to interact with them here.

[kellan_the_tabby]

Yay for Etsy shop pimpage! I'm at:

http://omshanti.etsy.com/.

[captain_starcat]

Etsy publicity, yay!

I'm fstdesigns over there. :D