Entry tags:
Progress Report: 2 June 2009
So, Monday was yesterday, and yet the Monday update is being posted today. Consider it your own little bit of space-time folding, spindling, and mutilation. (Translation: I brought the crud home from Las Vegas with me and I've spent the last few days curled up in bed and miserable.)
Slow update this week, but we do have a few things:
1. Wedding Bells
Congratulations to the newly-released Mr. and Mrs. Smith: version 1.0 came out of beta on May 24, in a gorgeous afternoon ceremony at the Green Valley Ranch in Las Vegas.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
janinedog was radiant; ![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
mark only cried a little bit when he saw her descending the grand staircase. (I resisted the urge to rickroll the ceremony itself -- it was very very difficult, I'll have you know -- although several people did arrange with the DJ to rickroll the reception.)
They're currently honeymooning in an Undisclosed Location, and are expected back on the 15th.
And, because I would be remiss if I did not mock, I present to you a photo of Mark doing the YMCA at the (equally lovely) reception. If news of my untimely death is posted on the 16th, you'll know that it was no accident.
Barring technical difficulties or the vagaries of editing, I'll be appearing on NPR to discuss advertising on social media (and why it's not a good business model). We'll be recording the interview later this week, and I'll be sure to update y'all when the segment airs.
This is a good time to remind everyone that bothmark and I are available for interviews, conference panels, speeches, and other forms of talking to humans in public. You can get in touch with us via email at the_bosses@dwscoalition.org, or just email webmaster@dreamwidth.org.
Well, okay, not so much "death" as "cranky and irritated wishes for them to suffer a tragic and permanent loss of internet connectivity", but you know what I mean.
We've seen a decided uptick in anonymous comment spam in the past two weeks. Our antispam team has posted a guide to protecting your journal from spam; even if you haven't been hit, you might want to read it over. (This is, for the record, why "anonymous commenting disabled" and "IP logging on" are the default settings for newly-created accounts on Dreamwidth; we were anticipating the problem, although not quite to this extent.)
There are a number of things we're looking into to prevent anonymous spam even before it reaches us, and we even had some great discussions with LJ engineering staff after the wedding (yes, we are that work-obsessed, although to our credit, we did wait until well after the wedding itself) about sharing resources to squash these scum like the vermin they are. In the meantime, if you receive a spam comment, delete it and choose the "mark as spam" option. From there, it will go into the antispam system, where our dedicated antispam team will leap into action and swing the banhammer with great force and glee.
It's been a slow two weeks for development, what with wedding festivities, but we've still managed to commit fixes for 42 items since the last time we updated, with special thanks going out tokareila for chewing through bugfixes and afuna for being the review & commit monster. Our next code push will include bugfixes to tag renaming, tag management, tag import, and birthday notifications, among many others.
A special "omg thank you guys" goes to the support team, who've been moving heaven and earth to handle things over the past two weeks whilemark and I have been less available. Remember, support on DW is all you guys, all the time. We'd love to have you pitching in -- check out ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_support_training for more information.
For those of you who've been curious about what "active in some way" means on the stats page, that number is defined as "posted, commented, or logged in in the past 30 days". And the good news is, it's been over 30 days since Dreamwidth launched to open beta, and our active usage is still going strong. We're really happy to see that people are not only joining up, but using their Dreamwidth accounts. (I'm pretty sure it's going to take me a while to get over the stupid grin I get every time I see a link to DW "in the wild".)
You may see a drop in the number of paid accounts on our beta stats page (and yeah, we know that the total account number figure is waaaaay off) -- that's actually completely expected, since we knew that a lot of people would be paying the $3 for one month of paid time and then letting their accounts lapse back to free accounts. We actually planned for a significant percentage of churn on one-month paid accounts, and I'm pleased to report that we've actually had more people renew their one-month paid accounts than we'd originally projected.
Overall, we're really pleased with how things are going, and we're really looking forward to being able to move past the "bugfix and minor improvements" phase to the "developing massive new features" phase soon.
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Small update this week, but the wedding ate up a lot of our energy! Next week's likely to be slow too, since withoutmark at the helm we won't be having any code pushes, but the week after, once he's back from his honeymoon (and recovered), we'll be catching up on the remaining patches that need to be reviewed and committed and sending them live.
In the meantime, if you're having any problems with your Dreamwidth account, our support team is standing by, and if you'd like to come hang out and be social with us in irc, we'd love to have you: irc.dwscoalition.org, port 6667, channel #dw.
Slow update this week, but we do have a few things:
1. Wedding Bells Are Ringing Have Rung
Congratulations to the newly-released Mr. and Mrs. Smith: version 1.0 came out of beta on May 24, in a gorgeous afternoon ceremony at the Green Valley Ranch in Las Vegas.
janinedog was radiant; mark only cried a little bit when he saw her descending the grand staircase. (I resisted the urge to rickroll the ceremony itself -- it was very very difficult, I'll have you know -- although several people did arrange with the DJ to rickroll the reception.)They're currently honeymooning in an Undisclosed Location, and are expected back on the 15th.
And, because I would be remiss if I did not mock, I present to you a photo of Mark doing the YMCA at the (equally lovely) reception. If news of my untimely death is posted on the 16th, you'll know that it was no accident.
2. Stop the Presses
Barring technical difficulties or the vagaries of editing, I'll be appearing on NPR to discuss advertising on social media (and why it's not a good business model). We'll be recording the interview later this week, and I'll be sure to update y'all when the segment airs.
This is a good time to remind everyone that both
mark and I are available for interviews, conference panels, speeches, and other forms of talking to humans in public. You can get in touch with us via email at the_bosses@dwscoalition.org, or just email webmaster@dreamwidth.org.3. Death to Spammers!
Well, okay, not so much "death" as "cranky and irritated wishes for them to suffer a tragic and permanent loss of internet connectivity", but you know what I mean.
We've seen a decided uptick in anonymous comment spam in the past two weeks. Our antispam team has posted a guide to protecting your journal from spam; even if you haven't been hit, you might want to read it over. (This is, for the record, why "anonymous commenting disabled" and "IP logging on" are the default settings for newly-created accounts on Dreamwidth; we were anticipating the problem, although not quite to this extent.)
There are a number of things we're looking into to prevent anonymous spam even before it reaches us, and we even had some great discussions with LJ engineering staff after the wedding (yes, we are that work-obsessed, although to our credit, we did wait until well after the wedding itself) about sharing resources to squash these scum like the vermin they are. In the meantime, if you receive a spam comment, delete it and choose the "mark as spam" option. From there, it will go into the antispam system, where our dedicated antispam team will leap into action and swing the banhammer with great force and glee.
4. Development
It's been a slow two weeks for development, what with wedding festivities, but we've still managed to commit fixes for 42 items since the last time we updated, with special thanks going out to
kareila for chewing through bugfixes and afuna for being the review & commit monster. Our next code push will include bugfixes to tag renaming, tag management, tag import, and birthday notifications, among many others. 5. Support
A special "omg thank you guys" goes to the support team, who've been moving heaven and earth to handle things over the past two weeks while
mark and I have been less available. Remember, support on DW is all you guys, all the time. We'd love to have you pitching in -- check out dw_support_training for more information.6. By the Numbers
For those of you who've been curious about what "active in some way" means on the stats page, that number is defined as "posted, commented, or logged in in the past 30 days". And the good news is, it's been over 30 days since Dreamwidth launched to open beta, and our active usage is still going strong. We're really happy to see that people are not only joining up, but using their Dreamwidth accounts. (I'm pretty sure it's going to take me a while to get over the stupid grin I get every time I see a link to DW "in the wild".)
You may see a drop in the number of paid accounts on our beta stats page (and yeah, we know that the total account number figure is waaaaay off) -- that's actually completely expected, since we knew that a lot of people would be paying the $3 for one month of paid time and then letting their accounts lapse back to free accounts. We actually planned for a significant percentage of churn on one-month paid accounts, and I'm pleased to report that we've actually had more people renew their one-month paid accounts than we'd originally projected.
Overall, we're really pleased with how things are going, and we're really looking forward to being able to move past the "bugfix and minor improvements" phase to the "developing massive new features" phase soon.
*
Small update this week, but the wedding ate up a lot of our energy! Next week's likely to be slow too, since without
mark at the helm we won't be having any code pushes, but the week after, once he's back from his honeymoon (and recovered), we'll be catching up on the remaining patches that need to be reviewed and committed and sending them live. In the meantime, if you're having any problems with your Dreamwidth account, our support team is standing by, and if you'd like to come hang out and be social with us in irc, we'd love to have you: irc.dwscoalition.org, port 6667, channel #dw.
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And: keep on truckin'!
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I haven't used my journal much yet, but if I'm still impressed next month I'm gonna buy myself a paid account for my birthday. *crosses fingers*
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Janine and Mark look wonderful, and that officiator there looks pretty durned elegant as well.
<3 to the lot of you.
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*\o/*
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*is a master of the code-bork*
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Death to Spammers!
Hangin's too good for 'em!! Burnin's too good for 'em!! They should be torn into little bitsy pieces and BURIED ALIVE!!! /\__/\ (='.'=) (")_(") Music: Mike Oldfield - Dark IslandRe: Death to Spammers!
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Oh, this isn't an issue per se. However, my college only uses IE on their computers and the posting box looked horrendous on it. I couldn't see where I was supposed to type, things were out of place or hidden, etc., etc.
I use FireFox everywhere else, so usually it doesn't matter, and maybe this is a known issue, but a few things, especially the posting page, is not IE friendly.
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I'll see if I can find someone who knows more about Dreamwidth's plans that involve IE 6.IRC advises me that there's even a FAQ about older browsers and how to get around them on the update page: http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=149no subject
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advertising on social media
The public at large is pretty much thoroughly saturated ad nausem with banner, strip and pop-up ads, with more and more of the Internet user-base seeking a way away from it and one of the reasons why I'm happy to be a paid member and help towards DW funding its operating costs is that there is no advertising.
If the other journal wishes to seek both paid accounts and advertisers, that's fine. I just don't want to be a part of it. No thanks.
/\__/\ (='.'=) (")_(")Music: "Hallelujah" from the motion picture When Night is Falling.no subject
We actually planned for a significant percentage of churn on one-month paid accounts, and I'm pleased to report that we've actually had more people renew their one-month paid accounts than we'd originally projected.
I'm one of the people who originally bought a paid account mainly just to sign up, and had planned to only keep it paid for the month and then let it lapse to a free account. But I've been pleased enough with the way the site is handling things so far, and fond of the paid features, that I ended up extending my paid time for a bit.
Keep up the good work! *g*
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To both Mark & Janinedog!