Weekly News: 12 November

[denise]

So, last week I predicted that by this week I'd be freaking out about the fact that someone thought sarah and I were grownups enough to let us buy a freaking house. I am happy to report that this freakout is continuing right on pace. Oh my God, the closing is in ten days.

We don't have to be out of our current place until the end of December, so the Dreamwidth payment and administrative address won't be changing until mid-December. We'll be sure to let you know when it does.

In this week's update, behind the cut, we have:

* Development
* Code Push
* DW via Newsreaders: A Poll
* Wayward Check Payment
* Community Awesomeness
* NaNoWriMo
* Holiday Promotion
* DW Merchandise

Development

This week's code tour comes to us courtesy of truelove (her first, and thank you for doing it!) This week's work includes a whole whackload of bugfixes for little things that have been annoying us for a while, including an instance where yvi noticed a bug while using her journal, chased it down, filed a bug for it, and patched the bug, all within something like 45 minutes. Go, yvi! (That's one of the things I like the most about DW dev work. I always have these moments where I stumble across one of the little things that have been driving me batty for years, and right as I'm gritting my teeth to work around it for the eight jillionth time, I realize: hey, wait, I can TOTALLY FIX THIS MYSELF NOW.)

Also, I accidentally overlooked cheyinka's first contribution two weeks ago! cheyinka contributed two new themes, which I totally spaced on giving public kudos for. Thanks, cheyinka!

Code Push

As is growing standard, we have tentatively scheduled a code push this weekend, to cover the things that are in last week's code tour and this week's code tour. Keep an eye on dw_maintenance for the 411.

DW via Newsreaders: Poll

So, a while back (and we're a little embarrassed to admit how long this has been sitting in the patch review queue -- we're really sorry about that), noodles wrote an epic patch to allow users to access Dreamwidth via NNTP, the protocol that Usenet runs on. This means that you'd be able to interact with DW via a newsreader program such as Forté, Seamonkey Mail & Newsgroups, XNews, or Unison. Or, indeed, anything that serves as a Usenet client. (tin all the way, baby.)

We've been sort of torn on this one, because on the one hand, it'd be kind of really awesome to access DW via NNTP, and I have been missing Usenet incredibly fiercely for a while. (Yes, I know Usenet still exists. I miss Usenet when it was readable.) Plus, we know we're short on desktop-type programs that people can use to interact with DW. (We're working on 'em. Really.) On the other hand, NNTP access isn't one of our core focuses, and we don't want to add something (that we'd then have to support) if people aren't going to use it, since that would result in more opportunities for things to break horribly and more developer time and effort needed to maintain it.

So, to that effect, a poll:

Poll #5038

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 604

View Respondents

Would you use a newsreader to interact with DW if we added the option?

View Answers

Hell yes, absolutely!
44 (7.3%)

I would try it out to see I liked the implementation.
89 (14.7%)

I would try it out if I found a newsreader I liked.
64 (10.6%)

No, it's not my thing. Change is annoying, man.
109 (18.0%)

You are speaking words. I am sure they are in English, and yet I know not what you are saying.
286 (47.4%)

I will complain about the narrow options given in this poll in the comments!
12 (2.0%)

Wayward Check Payment

If you are Dana S of New Jersey, and you recently sent us a check to pay for your order, please contact me at accounts@dreamwidth.org or open a Support request in the Account Payments category! The order number written on your check isn't properly matching up with a checked-out cart, and I want to make sure that we can credit your payment to your account.

Community Awesomeness

* This week's Dreamwidth Etsy Treasury has items from several new or newly-opened shops in addition to the usual assortment -- check it out to see some of the craft work our DW users come up with. (And if you've got an Etsy shop I don't have on my list, comment here or in that entry with the link so I can be sure to add you.)

* Since I've been skewed towards Etsy for the last month or so when highlighting DW artisans, mostly because Etsy's treasury feature makes it really easy to make the weekly list, I figured I would start adding the weekly artisan shop elsewhere on the internet as a separate highlight! This week, we bring you the designs of Nik Sanders, who makes jewelry (and who has awesome item naming schemes -- that's always the worst part for me and sarah when we're listing items!)

* The photo of the week from the Dreamwidth Flickr pool is this awesome Cambridge pub sign by Kake Pugh. (I had a hard time choosing this week, but this one very narrowly edged out Gali-Dana's shot at the Natural History museum.) There's something about the composition and the lighting that really draws my eye!

* For the fiber artists among us, how about the Dreamwidth Knitters group on Ravelry? Ravelry users can check out Knitronomicon's knitted TARDIS. (Ravelry account required, alas, although aunty_marion, the knitter, has pictures up on Flickr too: 1, 2.)

NaNoWriMo

We are rapidly approaching the midpoint of November (oh god please don't remind me), so I figured it was a good time to mention our NaNoWriMo tag on the Latest Things page! If you are looking for some fellow Wrimos on DW, that's the place to go.

Our special offer for NaNo participants will be active through to November 30.

Holiday Promotion

The end-of-year holidays are rapidly approaching (my family celebrates Christmas, so if y'all catch me saying "Christmas season" by default in one of these updates, please gently nudge me to cut it out), and I am proud to announce that a) this year, sarah and I finished all of our holiday shopping in January; b) we are hosting the family celebration ourselves, in our new house. This also means that it's time to start thinking about our holiday present to y'all, namely, our annual holiday sale/promotion.

There are two options we can do this year, and you all get to vote on which one you would rather have!

Option A: For every six months of paid time (or the equivalent in points) you buy for someone else, get 60 Dreamwidth points (the equivalent of 2 months of paid time) for yourself.

Option B: All orders receive a 10% points bonus: if you buy 100 points (or the equivalent in paid time), you actually receive 110 points.

(Dreamwidth points can be used for orders, or stored for later. I am particularly looking forward to the combination of v-gifts and points: no more hauling out the credit card and going through the hassle of typing it in for a $1 charge every time you want to send a v-gift, just buy $10 of points whenever you run out and use those to send v-gifts whenever you want.)

There are pluses and minuses for both: Option A gives you a reward for gift-giving and facilitates giving presents, but doesn't give you any benefit to buying paid time for yourself, while Option B is a slightly more generous bonus, but doesn't encourage gift-giving quite as much.

On the code side, while the code for both has been written at one point, option B is the only one that was designed for the points system to begin with; we'd have to do more work to adapt last year's promotion for option A to the points system. We'd prefer to go with Option B because of that, but we did Option A last year and we don't want to change things up on people if they really prefer the other way. So, you get your second poll of the update:

Poll #5039

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 342

View Respondents

The holiday promotion should be:

View Answers

Option A (2 months paid time for me for every 6 months I buy for someone else)
95 (27.8%)

Option B (10% points bonus on all orders)
247 (72.2%)

DW Merchandise

And, may I say, Dreamwidth swag makes excellent holiday presents. In fact, I think I may take some time this weekend and finally make the Dreamsheep line of DW swag I've been meaning to! If there are any other designs you'd like to see, let us know in the comments.

If you have a DW-related design that you think would be awesome on some DW swag, let us know too. Vector art of the Dreamwidth logo can be found as attachments to Bug 104 in Bugzilla. We'd absolutely love to have a wider variety of stuff using the DW logo, in as many different looks as possible -- no two DW users are the same, so why should our tshirts and mugs all look alike?

You can design for specific products, or just give us artwork and let us run with putting it on whatever merchandise we think it will look good on. Please submit artwork emailed to denise AT dreamwidth DOT org, as vector graphics or as PNG files with a minimum of 150ppi resolution -- you can see Zazzle's image guidelines for more information. You will retain full rights to your design, but we will ask you to sign a Contributor Licensing Agreement giving us a worldwide, non-exclusive license to print and distribute your work.

We'll give you 500 Dreamwidth Points (which will buy 12 months of Premium Paid time, or a little less than a year and a half of regular paid time) for each design we accept. We'll also give you a $25 Zazzle gift certificate so you can order some of your merch. (Designs will be counted as base artwork, not per item it's designed for.)

*

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 for our next update. At which point it will be three days to closing, and I will be freaking out even more.

Comments

[cheyinka]

Eee, thanks for mentioning me! fu mentioned me last week so I wasn't feeling neglected, don't worry :)

(Also, I voted in the polls as my writing journal. Oops.)

[jld]

So, for the NNTP thing, there's part of me that wants to be all YES YES YES YES YES YES YES, but… the last time I was thinking about this, in '05 or so, it occurred to me that there'd be a bunch of impedance mismatch around comments, mostly in the area of quoting — Usenet followups have to quote what they're replying to (and preferably trim and arrange it properly) or they wind up semi-unreadable, because the parent post isn't on the screen, might not have been read in the current session, and (esp. historically) might not have even been received at all; web comments, OTOH, have the parent item right there, and so usually don't quote anything, but sometimes do (and not using any consistent markup for it, either). And I never quite figured out what I wanted to do about that. But I also haven't looked at the proposed patch, so maybe there's a neat solution there.

That, and: for me personally, I don't use a graphical newsreader, so anything with images or other markup would be ‘interesting’. But that's me.

[azurelunatic]

Bearing in mind a) I haven't looked at the patch, b) I've never used a newsreader myself (well, I think I might have set up one once? and then never used it?) and c) DW's lovely increased comment length -- to make for readability and context both, might this be a case for automatic bottom-quoting in the export? In the case that one's read the previous stuff, all however many characters of it won't be at the top in the way. The new material will be at the top, with or without whatever quoting the person's done. And then whatever it's in reply to can be at the bottom and easily available for context if necessary. Which is less convenient than quoting properly, but at least it's there. (Or, unfortunately it's there, if it's long and unneeded, but perhaps easier to ignore than in its entirety at the top.) Or ... I wonder if there would be some way to say "give me stuff with added context" / "give me stuff without added context", like some sort of ... subscription argument?? ... that would be able to tell Dreamwidth what to send and how.

(And you're very right: introducing NNTP will bring newsgroup commenting culture onto DW more than previously found, so there will be an effect even for those who don't use newsreaders themselves.)

[lorem_ipsum]

Maybe it's time to reintroduce the culture of selective quoting? Back in ye olde mailing-list-based-fandom days, we'd hit "reply" and then trim the quoted parts down to the relevant bits--sometimes just a phrase or single word (uphill! in the snow!). I still do it.

...There ought to be a way to design the software to encourage selective quoting, but I haven't the faintest idea how you'd go about it.

[sophie]

In case anybody's wondering why they would want to use a newsreader and what this whole NNTP thing is all about, I made a post explaining it and how it would be relevant to Dreamwidth. Essentially, think of a newsreader as a client that doesn't just let you post, but also lets you read communities, journals and feeds in your circle along with all the comments, in an interface remarkably similar to a threaded email client.

(By the way, Denise, your thing about the house makes me think of this xkcd comic!)

[ein_myria]

Thanks for the info. I've actually used usenet before (didn't realize that was what those newsgroups were called!) aeons ago but wasn't sure what the news post was really talking about. :)

[yr_spooky_grrlfriend]

and who has awesome item naming schemes

Aw, thank you. I wholly blame Windows Media Player, though. They're all seriously whatever comes up on random when I start or finish something. I'm absolutely floored to get mentioned and it might take days to get the dopey grin off of my face.

~sanders

[jd]

So, one thing I'm not sure I get about the NNTP thing is, that would notify you whenever there was a comment made to any post that is on your reading page?

This sounds like an equivalent of having ESN tracking on every post that is ever made on your read page, by default. I'm not saying that wouldn't be handy, but it may have privacy/"is-this-creepy" implications that may not have been thought about. (Or, not having ever used Usenet besides that once for file sharing, I could be mistaken about how it works.)

[jld]

That's pretty much the result. Any comment made in a journal would add a new article to its group, and then when your newsreader checks for new news it'll see that the group's highest article number is higher than before and tell you there are N new articles.

Or, put another way, the way Usenet works is that you see every article posted to a group; threading is actually kind of pastede on yay, in that it exists because each post has a References: header line listing its immediate ancestors and the newsreader reconstructs the followup tree from that.

(The LJ code is probably not unlike that internally — I know that comments use a serial number that's global over the entire journal they're in, not just the post — but it's all laden down with secret 8-bit talkid tags and boxed off behind restrictive web stuff which THOU SHALT NOT SCREEN-SCRAPE AT THE PERIL OF THY IMMORTAL SOUL or however that went, so it's got a very different set of expectations, as you point out.)

Personally… while I certainly understand that there are cases where taking information that was already visible in some form and aggregating it can cross the line into creepiness, I don't know that comments on the old posts of journals you subscribe to should be that big a thing. Others may disagree, and probably will, but then there are people who object in similar terms to the DW importer, or to syndicated feeds.

I guess one way to think about it is in terms of what actions you'd have to take to get a similar effect. Here, it's like going back arbitrarily far on your reading page (and magically skipping the old stuff). It's not like people don't sometimes go back a bit into posts they've already seen checking for new comments (cf. the ?nc= thing); this is kind of an extension of that. By contrast, for the (apparently actually once proposed for LJ?) hypothetical feature of subscribing to every visible-to-you comment a person makes anywhere, even on a journal you have no connection to, that's more like going into a person's profile and looking through everything they're subscribed to and then going through every post in all of those — or, I guess, subcribing to all of them yourself and making a custom group for them, which you read for the sole purpose of picking out that one person's comments. In neither case is this not highly creepy. I'm not sure this is the most robust way to think about this, because it's defined in terms of existing features, but maybe it's something.

Also OMG long comment. I should probably make a post out of some of this.

Merch sadness

[aedifica]

I would love to buy a Dreamwidth t-shirt or something, but Zazzle doesn't appear to have anything that meets my three criteria of 1) available in my size, 2) a style I'd wear, and 3) a price I find reasonable for the item. (The women's babydoll, which is the one I'd like to buy, says it runs small so the largest size they offer would probably be too tight on me; the other styles I might get instead are priced higher than my desire for them.)

I don't know any better option than Zazzle, which is why I'm not suggesting any alternatives or saying you should have gone with another site; just giving input on why this one person who likes Dreamwidth a whole lot isn't buying any DW swag. Maybe sometime when I feel less risk-averse I'll try buying the one that runs small, and see if the largest size is maybe big enough after all...

(Winter icon in honor of it being the first day I thought it was cold enough to want my winter coat!)

Re: Merch sadness

[cyprinella]

Just to give you an idea on sizing, I recently bought two of their ladies petite t-shirts in 2X. I'm a big busted lady and generally am buying shirts in an 18-20 right now. The two shirts are definitely snug. I am not comfortable wearing them in public right now, but I have some issues about snug clothing and how it looks on me. If you want to see how they fit and judge if you'd think they'd be too tight for comfort, I have some pictures of me here in a variety of different zazzle shirts.

Re: Merch sadness

[denise]

I know that damned_colonial did a tutorial on how to get larger-sized tshirts from zazzle ... *hunts hunts* here! I do not know if that will help.

(And yeah, I spent about four months trying to find a place that had women's babydoll shirts in larger sizes. This was the best. :/)

[tibia]

Is the month of paid account time strictly for new users signing up to DW? I'm participating in NaNo, but I already had an account here. Just curious, is all.

[denise]

Yup, only for new accounts. Sorry!

NNTP

[shadytail]

Yes! Finally! I have been wanting this for years now. I'd finally be able to follow kink memes and stories-in-comments and deeply-nested RP dialogs.

I bet it'd be less scary to post, too, if that is made available.

[freya46]

Did I remember to wish you much luck, love and happiness in the house??
(((((HUGS)))

[stormy1x2]

. In fact, I think I may take some time this weekend and finally make the Dreamsheep line of DW swag I've been meaning to!

Is there a particular style you're looking for? Do you have examples of the dreamsheep (assuming it's along the lines of Frank the goat from LJ) or are you looking for members to design something entirely different using any model/pose in sheep form?

[cesy]

dreamsheep has a load of examples.

[denise]

I was just going to use the base dreamsheep that helens78 made *g*

[seeitbloom]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who had absolutely no clue what you were talking about. I figure the people who WANT the option care a lot more about it than those of us who are clueless on the topic, though, so perhaps their opinions should count for more. I'm a bit curious on what it would mean, though. Would it affect all users' experience when dealing with DW news, or would it be something that we wouldn't notice unless we used the...er, option? See, I know absolutely nothing about this, heh.

[denise]

Nope, you wouldn't even notice. :)

[sally_maria]

In fact, I think I may take some time this weekend and finally make the Dreamsheep line of DW swag I've been meaning to!

Yay! That's great news, I've been wanting and waiting for that since you mentioned it. :-)

NNTP AUTH

[thorfinn]

I assume this will *not* support NNTP AUTH PLAIN, unless the connection is tunneled over SSL?

[hummingwolf]

I remember Usenet, but I'm afraid my response to the NNTP idea is, "Wait... people still use newsreaders? For anything? Those didn't all disappear about seven years ago? Huh."

[trinity_clare]

I think this is the third news post in a row that I've commented on re: the awesomeness of AJAXified polls, but there is extra squee this time -- not only do they continue to be awesome, but they are awesome when viewed from my phone. Hovercars or no hovercars, this might actually be the future!

[tatsuyes]

thanks for this!