Update: Seed Account Re-sale, Free Users + Custom Styles

[mark]

Two things for you today!


Thing the first:

We have not been able to finish and fully test the new site functionality that enables people to purchase accounts without a PayPal account. Instead of finishing it up an hour before the first sale is scheduled and crossing our fingers that it works, we've decided to push the sale off another week.

The new time of the Seed Account re-sale is Thursday, May 14th, 9PM EDT and again at Friday, May 15th, 9AM EDT. In total 200 accounts will be available.


Thing the second:

People with free accounts have probably noticed that a few days ago we took away the Advanced Customization area of the site. (The pages that let you make a custom style.) We had never intended for it to be available unless you paid, and having it on was an oversight on our part. After we turned it off, we got to hear a lot of really good comments from people and we reevaluated the original decision.

We've turned it back on, but gave free users a pretty low limit on the number of styles you can create (1 custom style, up to 5 layers). Short story: you can once again go back to customizing and importing styles from other sites. Sorry for the trouble!

Comments

[foxfirefey]

Now we must figure out awesome paid community features, 'cause that was one of the only paid features that was actually useful for communities!

[matgb]

Big suggestion (for all paid, but especially comms).

Proper domain mapping (like they've managed with independentminds on LJ), so I can pay for a domain name, map it to a DW comm, and run that comm like a proper blog, with all internal links on it showing as domain/1234.html, etc.

Including allowing for that Google thing where you can define the actual location of a duplicate page in the header text, etc.

I'm working on setting up a new uber group blog within UK politics. We're going with Wordpress because it does everything we want, but domain mapping would make it easier in the future to promote a hosted alternative.

[denise]

Oh, God, the domain forwarding stuff is totally on my list of stuff I want to fix up next year, once we get some of the major new features we want to add settled. A lot of what I want to do in the medium term is looking at blog hosting and content management platforms like TypePad/Movable Type, Wordpress, etc, to mine them for good ideas and tweak their implementations into something that would fit better into our way of doing things.

[matgb]

This? I like this.

Had a meeting this evening, bunch of prominent party bloggers talking crap. Spent a good ten minutes talking through why LJ (and now DW) is so much better than Blogger and merely different to the other prominent platforms.

Other things I'd like in my "proper blogging" wishlist would be aggregator pinging (maybe a deal with automattic, they ping everywhere for you if you've got a WP install), and sidebar widget embeds for things like Twitter and Delicious. Easy incoming links tracking is good service, not pingbacks, pointless, but technorati/icerocket stuff, etc.

Styled profile/about pages would also be fairly essential—in fact, static pages generally would be good.

But like you said, wishlist for down the line.

[ree]

Just wanted to point out that pinging everywhere wouldn't require a special deal with Automattic; their Ping-O-Matic is open for public use.

[matgb]

True, but I suspect the terms of use would be different for a personal blogger and a blog hosting service. At the very least, it'd be polite to ask.

Having said that, manually pinging everywhere is better than not pinging at all, that's something I missed existing, danke.

[elfgirl]

sidebar widget embeds for things like Twitter and Delicious

This would rock like a big rocking thing.

[eagle]

I don't know if someone has already suggested this or not, but what I'd absolutely love is a way to gate a community to a mailing list so that people could subscribe to a mailing list to get all the posts as threaded mail messages. Some people really prefer e-mail to a web board discussion, so being able to present the same content either way is a killer feature.

And the code to do this is essentially already there in the tracking code. The only problem right now is that you have to track the community to get the initial posts, and then for each initial post, you have to track *it* to get all of the comments. And of course each person doing this needs to have a paid account so that they can do post tracking.

A paid community feature that would gate all posts and comments to a mailing list using the same format as track notifications would be great. It should also be cheap, since it's a single global flag for the community as opposed to something that has to be checked in multiple places and that potentially involves multiple trackers, although I don't know the internal structure of the code.

[denise]

This is an awesome suggestion, marred only by the fact that "mailing list gateway" immediately brings up memories of the year or so where brad kept threatening to completely rewrite LJ as a POP server. *G*

[sophie]

I just saw this comment looking back at old entries. I had no idea he had planned to do that.

How was it going to work?

[denise]

I have no idea. I think the idea was that each of your friends' entires were going to be a message, and each of the comments would be a reply.