Entry tags:
Progress Report: 6 April 2009
THIS ... IS .... UPDAAAAAAAAAAATE
By the numbers:
Days to open beta: 23
Number of resolved bugs over all time: 442
Current Dreamwidth accounts (personal, OpenID, communities, and feeds): 15,989
1. SETTING RECORDS
We set a development record this week: we resolved a total of 102 bugs, of which 93 were resolved/fixed (aka, patched -- the other 9 were duplicates or invalid).
A few weeks ago, I did a "changelog explained" post, where I took every patch we checked in that week and walked everyone through what it did, why we did it, and why we thought it was important. People really seemed to find that valuable, so I did it again this week (three weeks is just barely enough time to recover):
The Week In Code
This post -- it's long, but I think it's really fascinating -- details every bug we resolved this week, along with a brief description, hopefully understandable by the non-technically-inclined, as to what it does and why we thought it was important. It was a very diverse week. From small improvements (OMG you can preview a comment directly from the inline comment form now, thanks to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
allen) to big projects, from backend cleanup to new features (you can now add links to your Twitter and Delicious accounts from the profile, for instance -- that was totally me), it was a banner week all around. Look over the list; you'll probably find one or two things on it that will make you jump up and down and go "OMG, THAT." (My own OMG, THAT list is about half of those...)
A really interesting data point: that list contains 20 patches by me and 1 patch by![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
mark (who's nose-deep in our payment system this week). The rest of the week's development -- 72 patches in total -- came from members of our volunteer development community. Now that's the beauty of open source.
We particularly welcome our new contributors: this week, we accepted first patches fromalierak, av8rmike, syntheid, brownbetty dreamnestia, hotlevel4, invisionary, kfk2, sixbeforelunch, and ursamajor! This week, we also added more resources to the machine that runs our Dreamhack server, which allows us to offer development space to more people. If you're looking to get started in Dreamwidth development, but you lack the resources to run the code on your own, we've got your back.
2. EXPANDING CLOSED BETA
We've been busy extending the closed beta to additional eyeballs! This week, we distributed a bunch of invites to random people who were subscribed to the dw-discuss mailing list and random people who had logged into Dreamwidth with their OpenID accounts and set and validated an email address. We also threw out a few invite codes on our Twitter account (and let me tell you, it was amazing how fast they were used!)
This week, we'll be distributing invites in the same way -- as well as some others that we've yet to determine -- in order to help get some more information about how our current server architecture can stand up to more load, as well as getting more people poking at the system and seeing what's confusing and what can still stand to be improved. If you get a random Dreamwidth invite, it will tell you what criteria you matched on. You aren't expected to do any formal testing -- just move in and start using the site the way you normally would (although see the next point for more information on that!) While we're still finishing up a lot of things, both the big projects and the small touches, nearly everything is more-or-less functional at the moment.
We also gave out 114 invite codes to people who've contributed to the project so far in the areas of coding, styles work, or documentation work, for them to hand out to their friends, and we'll continue to do so through the next few weeks. We had originally said that we'd offer one invite for every patch committed to our code repository until I wrote this update, and it worked so nicely that we're going to continue to offer that "bounty" at least through the end of closed beta, so if you just missed getting your patch sent in, don't worry.
3. KNOWN ISSUES
If you've gotten an invite to the Dreamwidth closed beta, or have been exploring while using your OpenID login, you might be wondering where to report problems that you're having.
The most up-to-date information about bugs that have been reported, but haven't yet been fixed, can be found in Bugzilla:
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:
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.)
If you run into something that you think is a bug, and you don't see it listed in Bugzilla or on the Known Issues list, contactdomtheknight via DW private message so our beta testers can work on confirming it and writing a bug report. If you notice something that's working, but you think it should work differently, contact me and mark by emailing the_bosses@dwscoalition.org or comment to this post.
4. LIFE IN CLOSED BETA
So, if you've gotten a Dreamwidth invite, you're probably wondering: what next? Fortunately, the awesomely-informativezvi has written a "Guide to Dreamwidth in Closed Beta":
Guide to Dreamwidth in Closed Beta
zvi's been doing a lot of great work in writing tutorials and sharing information, and I've been pointing everybody at her entry because it covers a lot of the absolute basics. (By the time we launch to open beta, we should have "migration guides" -- how to move in from LJ, Wordpress, Blogger, etc, and what's different from those services.)
As a reminder, everyone on the service should, at the very minimum, be reading![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_news and dw_maintenance. We post about what we're doing in dw_news, and we post about any issues affecting the whole site, as well as any downtime announcements, to dw_maintenance.
5. HELP US BRAINSTORM
As we're getting closer to open beta, some of the "rooms" are still covered in sheetrock dust and propped-up sawhorses, but we're putting the finishing touches on others. Specifically, we're looking for some community brainstorming on a few documentation issues.
If you've ever tried to style or customize your journal,ysobel is looking for feedback on the documentation for the customization system: what you would find helpful, what you've always wanted to know, what kind of documentation you'd be looking for if you went to go customize your journal, etc. That brainstorming post can be found here:
Documentation questions!
sophie and I, meanwhile, are building the site tour -- a high-level, informative list about What Makes DW Awesome, with emphasis on the features that make us a site people will want to use. This isn't intended to be documentation, per se; it's more of a very brief overview of DW's features, in the thirty-second soundbite/bullet-point style. If you have some ideas there, come leave them for us:
Site tour
6. SIX FAVORITE ADDITIONS
For those who are feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of all of this stuff to look at, I decided I'd do some quick breakdowns! What follows will be some of my "favorites" lists.
In case you didn't want to read through that entire list of 93 (!) changes this week, let's start with highlighting my six most favorite code changes of the week:
1. We fixed the mistake with double-escaping the text of private messages when emailed, so now when you get emailed a copy of the message someone just PMed you, it isn't full of weird #39; and the like.
2. We fixed the bug in the importer that caused imported tags not to appear on your journal sidebar or your tag page.
3. We added Twitter and Delicious fields to the profile, so you can let your readers know where else you can be found. (More to come, including a better way of handling it so people can add arbitrary social networks!)
4. We added a "preview comment" button to the inline comment form that displays when you hit the comment link while you're reading a page (instead of requiring people to hit "more options" or "check spelling and preview" to preview).
5. We fixed the handling of screened comments so that they aren't just more easy to visually distinguish, but so that the icon that appears to screen/unscreen has the appropriate alt-text, which was a major accessibility win. (Screenreaders and text-based browsers were unable to distinguish between screened and unscreened comments. We plan to make it even more obvious as time goes on, too.)
6. We made the lynx (light mode) site scheme tell you whether you're logged in or not (and if so, as whom) -- which is also a big accessibility win, for a very small amount of effort.
Honorable mention goes to: re-adding the contextual popup, which is that little thing that appears when you mouse over the userhead icon, which we'd broken with some earlier work. (You can still turn it off, just like you can on LJ.)
7. FIVE FAVORITE WIKI PAGES
My five favorite Wiki pages, either because they're a great example of things being built collaboratively over iteration or because I think they present really important information:
1. Beginning Dev Checklist -- This is the start of our documentation for people who are absolute beginners at coding, covering everything from the very basics of how to get started to the finer details of working with our code. I like this one because it's a good example of someone dumping a bunch of unorganized thoughts into a Wiki page, and other people coming along and expanding, improving, and rearranging it.
2. Dreamwidth.org Business FAQs -- This is a list of answers to things people have asked us about the business side of Dreamwidth Studios -- either about our philosophy or our process. (The sort of thing that will live in thedw_biz community as we start moving our operations over.) I like it because it's a really good place to go for finding out about the company philosophies.
3. Why Dreamwidth -- A collection of posts people have made about why they believe in the Dreamwidth project. I like this because every time I look at the enormous amount of work we still have to do and start getting depressed, I can go and read these links, because they remind me of the incredible things we've already accomplished. They're also a good introduction to the project for people who are looking to get up to speed quickly.
4. Wishlists -- A whole category, which is kinda cheating, but still: I love these pages because they're harnessing the collective power of ten years of the LiveJournal Suggestions community for things that could be improved or done better, and so many of those suggestions have sparked so many good ideas for improvement already.
5. Dreamwidth Icons -- I love this because there are some simply gorgeous icons there. I've been hard-pressed not to replace all my icons with Dreamwidth-related ones!
8. FOUR FAVORITE FAQs
My four favorite FAQs, because I really like the way they present their information and I really think they capture the site's tone and style properly, or because I think they're incredibly simple, clear, and easy to understand, are:
How does comment threading work?
How do I see another journal's locked entries?
What official Dreamwidth communities are there?
What is an OpenID account?
9. THREE FAVORITE BUGS
My three 'favorite' bugs -- the ones that I'm really looking forward to getting fixed -- are:
1. The one where -- for no readily-discernable reason -- you sometimes get an error message about "Your login cookie has disappeared" when you're trying to comment on someone's entry, especially if you're trying to log in while you're doing so. (We have some theories!)
2. The one where, if you're in a sub-filter of the Inbox, tick the "select all" tickbox in the Inbox, then delete every message you have ticked, the page refreshes to the main Inbox page and not the sub-filter you were on. We inherited that one from LJ, and it's been annoying the crap out of me forever.
3. The one where, if you get an error while you're commenting, it just gives you the error on the subsequent page without re-printing the text that you were trying to comment with for you to make the changes right there. That's a usability problem that's been annoying me for years.
10. TWO FAVORITE ENHANCEMENTS
My two favorite enhancements that I'm really looking forward to getting added to the site are:
1. Redoing the 'memories' feature to function more as bookmarks, where you'll be able to define a link as a bookmark, put it into tagged categories, add comments about why you bookmarked something, see who else has bookmarked that link and what they had to say about it, choose to make your bookmarks privately so your commentary or the fact you've bookmarked something doesn't get shown to anyone else, see all the bookmarks that people in your circle have made all in one place, see the most recent bookmarks that have been made site-wide, and generally do a bunch of awesome things with collective link-saving that will make discovering and remembering nifty content (on Dreamwidth and elsewhere on the Internet) a snap. We've prioritized the first draft of this feature for the fourth quarter of 2009. The spec for it is in Bug 210.
2. The crossposting system, which will let you update other journals or blogs directly from within Dreamwidth without having to remember to manually crosspost something. At launch, it will handle LJ and LJ-based systems; eventually, we have plans to extend it to a multitude of other blogging and personal-publishing software, including Wordpress, Blogger, and TypePad/Movable Type.allen has uploaded his first version of this enhancement already; mark reviewed the code and functionality this week, and allen will be working on the next iteration. This is an open-beta-blocking item, and will support crossposting to LJ and LJ-based systems by April 30.
(As a side note, I'd like to specifically callallen out for public appreciation. He has the knack for taking a proposed feature -- even if the spec exists only as me flailing around and saying "MAKE THIS WORK SOMEHOW" -- and producing something that's thoughtfully and craftily designed. We're really glad to have you, Allen.)
11. ONE FAVORITE COMMUNITY
My one favorite non-development-related community right now, meanwhile, is this one:
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
omnomnom
OM NOM NOM.
12. ICONS ARE LOVE
One of our closed-beta users,chasy, has started the community iconic to serve as an icon-sharing repository! To celebrate Dreamwidth's open-beta launch, she's running a contest, and offering three months of paid Dreamwidth time as a prize. So, if you're more graphically inclined than I am -- which isn't hard -- check it out:
Grand Opening! iCONtest! Win a Dreamwidth account 3 months paid!
It isn't official, but we still think it's pretty nifty.
13. FOR THE GEEKS
If you're interested in some of the technical details of our setup,mark's been making posts to dw_dev explaining things lately! Of particular note:
state of production: software!: Detail about the software we use to keep our production environment up and running smoothly.
Current architecture: Our current server architecture: what machines we have, and what they do.
site backup discussion: Beginning information about our backup and recovery plans.
13. PARTY TIME
So, we're launching to open beta on the night (US time) of April 30. This means it is time to start talking about the important stuff: the parties.
Mark and Janine will be out here in Baltimore for that week, and I'm not sure whether we're going to host any kind of party/event or if we're just going to be hunched over our computers typing frantically. But Skud (damned_colonial) is already coordinating the unofficial Bay Area launch party that Friday:
DW open beta launch party
If you're planning on coordinating a local-to-you Dreamwidth beta-launch party, let us know so we can include information in an update.
14. TALK TO US!
For commentary, quick questions, and important announcements, you can subscribe to thedw_news community:
dw_news
(You can log into the site with your OpenID account as well; OpenID users can maintain reading lists.)
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? Massive outpourings of love for the incredibly hard-working volunteer teams? Contact me and Mark at the_bosses@dwscoalition.org, or comment here.
We'll see you next week for our next update, which will hopefully be sent on the same day I start it next time.
By the numbers:
Days to open beta: 23
Number of resolved bugs over all time: 442
Current Dreamwidth accounts (personal, OpenID, communities, and feeds): 15,989
1. SETTING RECORDS
We set a development record this week: we resolved a total of 102 bugs, of which 93 were resolved/fixed (aka, patched -- the other 9 were duplicates or invalid).
A few weeks ago, I did a "changelog explained" post, where I took every patch we checked in that week and walked everyone through what it did, why we did it, and why we thought it was important. People really seemed to find that valuable, so I did it again this week (three weeks is just barely enough time to recover):
The Week In Code
This post -- it's long, but I think it's really fascinating -- details every bug we resolved this week, along with a brief description, hopefully understandable by the non-technically-inclined, as to what it does and why we thought it was important. It was a very diverse week. From small improvements (OMG you can preview a comment directly from the inline comment form now, thanks to
allen) to big projects, from backend cleanup to new features (you can now add links to your Twitter and Delicious accounts from the profile, for instance -- that was totally me), it was a banner week all around. Look over the list; you'll probably find one or two things on it that will make you jump up and down and go "OMG, THAT." (My own OMG, THAT list is about half of those...)A really interesting data point: that list contains 20 patches by me and 1 patch by
mark (who's nose-deep in our payment system this week). The rest of the week's development -- 72 patches in total -- came from members of our volunteer development community. Now that's the beauty of open source.We particularly welcome our new contributors: this week, we accepted first patches from
alierak, av8rmike, syntheid, brownbetty dreamnestia, hotlevel4, invisionary, kfk2, sixbeforelunch, and ursamajor! This week, we also added more resources to the machine that runs our Dreamhack server, which allows us to offer development space to more people. If you're looking to get started in Dreamwidth development, but you lack the resources to run the code on your own, we've got your back.2. EXPANDING CLOSED BETA
We've been busy extending the closed beta to additional eyeballs! This week, we distributed a bunch of invites to random people who were subscribed to the dw-discuss mailing list and random people who had logged into Dreamwidth with their OpenID accounts and set and validated an email address. We also threw out a few invite codes on our Twitter account (and let me tell you, it was amazing how fast they were used!)
This week, we'll be distributing invites in the same way -- as well as some others that we've yet to determine -- in order to help get some more information about how our current server architecture can stand up to more load, as well as getting more people poking at the system and seeing what's confusing and what can still stand to be improved. If you get a random Dreamwidth invite, it will tell you what criteria you matched on. You aren't expected to do any formal testing -- just move in and start using the site the way you normally would (although see the next point for more information on that!) While we're still finishing up a lot of things, both the big projects and the small touches, nearly everything is more-or-less functional at the moment.
We also gave out 114 invite codes to people who've contributed to the project so far in the areas of coding, styles work, or documentation work, for them to hand out to their friends, and we'll continue to do so through the next few weeks. We had originally said that we'd offer one invite for every patch committed to our code repository until I wrote this update, and it worked so nicely that we're going to continue to offer that "bounty" at least through the end of closed beta, so if you just missed getting your patch sent in, don't worry.
3. KNOWN ISSUES
If you've gotten an invite to the Dreamwidth closed beta, or have been exploring while using your OpenID login, you might be wondering where to report problems that you're having.
The most up-to-date information about bugs that have been reported, but haven't yet been fixed, can be found in Bugzilla:
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:
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.)
If you run into something that you think is a bug, and you don't see it listed in Bugzilla or on the Known Issues list, contact
domtheknight via DW private message so our beta testers can work on confirming it and writing a bug report. If you notice something that's working, but you think it should work differently, contact me and mark by emailing the_bosses@dwscoalition.org or comment to this post. 4. LIFE IN CLOSED BETA
So, if you've gotten a Dreamwidth invite, you're probably wondering: what next? Fortunately, the awesomely-informative
zvi has written a "Guide to Dreamwidth in Closed Beta":Guide to Dreamwidth in Closed Beta
zvi's been doing a lot of great work in writing tutorials and sharing information, and I've been pointing everybody at her entry because it covers a lot of the absolute basics. (By the time we launch to open beta, we should have "migration guides" -- how to move in from LJ, Wordpress, Blogger, etc, and what's different from those services.)As a reminder, everyone on the service should, at the very minimum, be reading
dw_news and dw_maintenance. We post about what we're doing in dw_news, and we post about any issues affecting the whole site, as well as any downtime announcements, to dw_maintenance.5. HELP US BRAINSTORM
As we're getting closer to open beta, some of the "rooms" are still covered in sheetrock dust and propped-up sawhorses, but we're putting the finishing touches on others. Specifically, we're looking for some community brainstorming on a few documentation issues.
If you've ever tried to style or customize your journal,
ysobel is looking for feedback on the documentation for the customization system: what you would find helpful, what you've always wanted to know, what kind of documentation you'd be looking for if you went to go customize your journal, etc. That brainstorming post can be found here:Documentation questions!
sophie and I, meanwhile, are building the site tour -- a high-level, informative list about What Makes DW Awesome, with emphasis on the features that make us a site people will want to use. This isn't intended to be documentation, per se; it's more of a very brief overview of DW's features, in the thirty-second soundbite/bullet-point style. If you have some ideas there, come leave them for us:Site tour
6. SIX FAVORITE ADDITIONS
For those who are feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of all of this stuff to look at, I decided I'd do some quick breakdowns! What follows will be some of my "favorites" lists.
In case you didn't want to read through that entire list of 93 (!) changes this week, let's start with highlighting my six most favorite code changes of the week:
1. We fixed the mistake with double-escaping the text of private messages when emailed, so now when you get emailed a copy of the message someone just PMed you, it isn't full of weird #39; and the like.
2. We fixed the bug in the importer that caused imported tags not to appear on your journal sidebar or your tag page.
3. We added Twitter and Delicious fields to the profile, so you can let your readers know where else you can be found. (More to come, including a better way of handling it so people can add arbitrary social networks!)
4. We added a "preview comment" button to the inline comment form that displays when you hit the comment link while you're reading a page (instead of requiring people to hit "more options" or "check spelling and preview" to preview).
5. We fixed the handling of screened comments so that they aren't just more easy to visually distinguish, but so that the icon that appears to screen/unscreen has the appropriate alt-text, which was a major accessibility win. (Screenreaders and text-based browsers were unable to distinguish between screened and unscreened comments. We plan to make it even more obvious as time goes on, too.)
6. We made the lynx (light mode) site scheme tell you whether you're logged in or not (and if so, as whom) -- which is also a big accessibility win, for a very small amount of effort.
Honorable mention goes to: re-adding the contextual popup, which is that little thing that appears when you mouse over the userhead icon, which we'd broken with some earlier work. (You can still turn it off, just like you can on LJ.)
7. FIVE FAVORITE WIKI PAGES
My five favorite Wiki pages, either because they're a great example of things being built collaboratively over iteration or because I think they present really important information:
1. Beginning Dev Checklist -- This is the start of our documentation for people who are absolute beginners at coding, covering everything from the very basics of how to get started to the finer details of working with our code. I like this one because it's a good example of someone dumping a bunch of unorganized thoughts into a Wiki page, and other people coming along and expanding, improving, and rearranging it.
2. Dreamwidth.org Business FAQs -- This is a list of answers to things people have asked us about the business side of Dreamwidth Studios -- either about our philosophy or our process. (The sort of thing that will live in the
dw_biz community as we start moving our operations over.) I like it because it's a really good place to go for finding out about the company philosophies.3. Why Dreamwidth -- A collection of posts people have made about why they believe in the Dreamwidth project. I like this because every time I look at the enormous amount of work we still have to do and start getting depressed, I can go and read these links, because they remind me of the incredible things we've already accomplished. They're also a good introduction to the project for people who are looking to get up to speed quickly.
4. Wishlists -- A whole category, which is kinda cheating, but still: I love these pages because they're harnessing the collective power of ten years of the LiveJournal Suggestions community for things that could be improved or done better, and so many of those suggestions have sparked so many good ideas for improvement already.
5. Dreamwidth Icons -- I love this because there are some simply gorgeous icons there. I've been hard-pressed not to replace all my icons with Dreamwidth-related ones!
8. FOUR FAVORITE FAQs
My four favorite FAQs, because I really like the way they present their information and I really think they capture the site's tone and style properly, or because I think they're incredibly simple, clear, and easy to understand, are:
How does comment threading work?
How do I see another journal's locked entries?
What official Dreamwidth communities are there?
What is an OpenID account?
9. THREE FAVORITE BUGS
My three 'favorite' bugs -- the ones that I'm really looking forward to getting fixed -- are:
1. The one where -- for no readily-discernable reason -- you sometimes get an error message about "Your login cookie has disappeared" when you're trying to comment on someone's entry, especially if you're trying to log in while you're doing so. (We have some theories!)
2. The one where, if you're in a sub-filter of the Inbox, tick the "select all" tickbox in the Inbox, then delete every message you have ticked, the page refreshes to the main Inbox page and not the sub-filter you were on. We inherited that one from LJ, and it's been annoying the crap out of me forever.
3. The one where, if you get an error while you're commenting, it just gives you the error on the subsequent page without re-printing the text that you were trying to comment with for you to make the changes right there. That's a usability problem that's been annoying me for years.
10. TWO FAVORITE ENHANCEMENTS
My two favorite enhancements that I'm really looking forward to getting added to the site are:
1. Redoing the 'memories' feature to function more as bookmarks, where you'll be able to define a link as a bookmark, put it into tagged categories, add comments about why you bookmarked something, see who else has bookmarked that link and what they had to say about it, choose to make your bookmarks privately so your commentary or the fact you've bookmarked something doesn't get shown to anyone else, see all the bookmarks that people in your circle have made all in one place, see the most recent bookmarks that have been made site-wide, and generally do a bunch of awesome things with collective link-saving that will make discovering and remembering nifty content (on Dreamwidth and elsewhere on the Internet) a snap. We've prioritized the first draft of this feature for the fourth quarter of 2009. The spec for it is in Bug 210.
2. The crossposting system, which will let you update other journals or blogs directly from within Dreamwidth without having to remember to manually crosspost something. At launch, it will handle LJ and LJ-based systems; eventually, we have plans to extend it to a multitude of other blogging and personal-publishing software, including Wordpress, Blogger, and TypePad/Movable Type.
allen has uploaded his first version of this enhancement already; mark reviewed the code and functionality this week, and allen will be working on the next iteration. This is an open-beta-blocking item, and will support crossposting to LJ and LJ-based systems by April 30.(As a side note, I'd like to specifically call
allen out for public appreciation. He has the knack for taking a proposed feature -- even if the spec exists only as me flailing around and saying "MAKE THIS WORK SOMEHOW" -- and producing something that's thoughtfully and craftily designed. We're really glad to have you, Allen.)11. ONE FAVORITE COMMUNITY
My one favorite non-development-related community right now, meanwhile, is this one:
omnomnomOM NOM NOM.
12. ICONS ARE LOVE
One of our closed-beta users,
chasy, has started the community iconic to serve as an icon-sharing repository! To celebrate Dreamwidth's open-beta launch, she's running a contest, and offering three months of paid Dreamwidth time as a prize. So, if you're more graphically inclined than I am -- which isn't hard -- check it out:Grand Opening! iCONtest! Win a Dreamwidth account 3 months paid!
It isn't official, but we still think it's pretty nifty.
13. FOR THE GEEKS
If you're interested in some of the technical details of our setup,
mark's been making posts to dw_dev explaining things lately! Of particular note:state of production: software!: Detail about the software we use to keep our production environment up and running smoothly.
Current architecture: Our current server architecture: what machines we have, and what they do.
site backup discussion: Beginning information about our backup and recovery plans.
13. PARTY TIME
So, we're launching to open beta on the night (US time) of April 30. This means it is time to start talking about the important stuff: the parties.
Mark and Janine will be out here in Baltimore for that week, and I'm not sure whether we're going to host any kind of party/event or if we're just going to be hunched over our computers typing frantically. But Skud (
damned_colonial) is already coordinating the unofficial Bay Area launch party that Friday:DW open beta launch party
If you're planning on coordinating a local-to-you Dreamwidth beta-launch party, let us know so we can include information in an update.
14. TALK TO US!
For commentary, quick questions, and important announcements, you can subscribe to the
dw_news community:dw_news(You can log into the site with your OpenID account as well; OpenID users can maintain reading lists.)
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? Massive outpourings of love for the incredibly hard-working volunteer teams? Contact me and Mark at the_bosses@dwscoalition.org, or comment here.
We'll see you next week for our next update, which will hopefully be sent on the same day I start it next time.