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

[wide_worlds_joy]

One place I can see the NNTP coming in really hand is corporate (and ISP) crackdowns on things they don't like (or understand) under the umbrella of "keeping the internets safe". If the ebil corps blocked DW totally for one reason or another, this is a good back up for getting all your feeds/followers because NO ONE remembers to block the NNTP for that same site. You have RSS implementation for all the places, this would be good too.

But, the fear of breakage and so on is legit.

My overall opinion? implement it, see how it runs. Go, say six months (to really SHAKE it down) and if it's still a sow's ear instead of a silk purse, dump it. No harm, no foul. DW users are more resilient than others, and won't regret having something they don't use taken back, if you explain it all.

[denise]

Ohhhh, I hadn't even thought about corporate blocks. That's almost a good enough reason to do it, period.

[wide_worlds_joy]

Had all my rec taken away by corporaate idiots. Had to find creative ways to access the same sites. Modems still work, amazingly enough, and NNTP and RSS allowed most of the access I needed, so it was a solution that I have done before.

You're welcome. LOL

[tangent_woman]

I have friends who are very grateful to be on DW because LJ is not available in their workplace. Come to think of it, I think I have friends who are on DW precisely because LJ is not available in their workplace -- or at least that was a key compelling factor in them making the change.

I'm liking the idea on so many levels.

[dzurlady]

I used DW once at work, and then suddenly it was blocked. I think they blocked it just because of me, and I work in quite a large organization. /o\ I just occasionally want to make a post! I wasn't even reading my circle!

[denise]

You know about post-by-email, right? Perfect for those "I want to just tell my circle this one thing --" when you can't actually load DW.

(We opened it up to everybody, too -- it's not just a paid user feature over here!)

[yvi]

This is rather unrelated but I have to share this and you reminded me:

The (big) company I work for blocks Dreamwidth, but not Livejournal for "Social networking".

[I suppose I triggered that by, um, checking whether the news post was up, I am just completely stumped and amused that LJ isn't blocked]

[tree]

hee! this, in turn, reminded me of the proud (yet sad) day that i discovered my work web-filtering software had finally started blocking dreamwidth. my thoughts were something like, "hey, we've arrived! oh, poop."

[akacat]

If the company you work for is anything like the company I work for -- it's because some VP uses livejournal. Anytime there's a huge crackdown, ebay and livejournal are unbanned by the same afternoon. I can't think of why they would do that unless some veep was complaining, since the firewall people have passwords around the banned list.

[ideological_cuddle]

Same reason why my employer blocks "file sharing" sites like Dropbox but not webmail like Google Mail -- someone sufficiently senior uses it, so it can't be blocked.

And this despite the excuses for blocking Dropbox/etc being either "SOX compliance" or "we must protect our intellectual property!!!1!one".

(But then, the people dumb enough to steal our stuff and email it to themselves have so far been dumb enough to use the corporate mail system. Well, the ones we've caught, anyway.)

[wide_worlds_joy]

There's a firefox plugin that lets you FTP files to Gmail. Then you can download it like a regular attachcment. It's cool IMO

[matgb]

Heh. My mobile ISP blocks DW as a "dating networking site", so I had to go through hoops to get them to admit I was an adult (same contract for 15 years, in my name, but that wasn't enough for them).

But it allows LJ without problems. I have no idea how they triggered DW given the number of users on that particular network must be fairly small.

[jld]

That is especially hilarious given that http://livejournal.com/singles exists and http://dreamwidth.org/singles does not.

[pauamma]

A shopping mall over here has a free wifi service with a web proxy that lets LJ in *except* for community.livejournal.com (and maybe syndicated.livejournal.com, I haven't tried). So you can read communities on your flist (as long as there's no lj-cut, or if you disabled them), but not comment in them.

(That kinda block wouldn't work with DW, it would need to be per-community or for all DW.)

[niqaeli]

This was my experience at my last job. I was utterly baffled.

I mean, I didn't actually plan to visit my journal at work, as I was paranoid about leaving traces connected to my online pseud were employers could access them, but, it just seemed so odd to block Dreamwidth and not LJ!

[trixtah]

I haven't worked in one organisation since around 1998 that permitted port 119 through a firewall. I'm amazed to hear that some orgs evidently are permissive in that way rather than closed (if you want a secure network, you normally block EVERYTHING, and then open only what's needed - for us, 80, 443, outbound 21, 25 and 1723).

At least RSS operates over 80, which almost no-one blocks.

[pauamma]

At a guess, you probably have 23 open too. :-)

[trixtah]

Actually, no, we don't. But I forgot 22. :-)

[matgb]

implement it, see how it runs. Go, say six months (to really SHAKE it down) and if it's still a sow's ear instead of a silk purse, dump it. No harm, no foul. DW users are more resilient than others

I agree with this. I might try it, but as long as everyone trying it knows it's a trial to see if it's worth the site supporting, then it should be fine.

If enough people really like it, then maybe one of them'll volunteer to dev/support it anyway.

We're still in beta after all, everything done is a trial to see if it works.

[sophie]

Agreed!

[jd]

Haha. How many things are there blocking launch? I can never remember (I know there's a list in Zilla, but I'm lazy/at work.)

[matgb]

Currently? Two or three, D went through and stripped quite a few non-essentials from the list a few months back.

[lorem_ipsum]

+1

Call it an alpha test.

[bell]

My overall opinion? implement it, see how it runs. Go, say six months (to really SHAKE it down) and if it's still a sow's ear instead of a silk purse, dump it. No harm, no foul. DW users are more resilient than others, and won't regret having something they don't use taken back, if you explain it all.

I support this idea. :D

[jumpuphigh]

I was going to say "No it's not my thing but I'm fine with change" but One place I can see the NNTP coming in really hand is corporate (and ISP) crackdowns on things they don't like (or understand) under the umbrella of "keeping the internets safe". changed my answer.

Now, I say, "do it!"