The Lunatic is in my Head

Stuff I do to keep my Dreamwidth usable on Mobile

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 00:54:00 GMT

Styles:
https://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/
* the Mobility base style, which is specifically designed to be usable on mobile; sadly it has only two themes at the moment; there may be other styles that are mobile-friendly, but this one is specific.
* Single column page setup

Settings:
Display tab:
https://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=display
Journal Pages: Shown to You: You can override other people's styles with a few options.
Navigation Strip: has a convenient shortcut to view other journals in different ways
Comment pages: if you have trouble with reading comments in other styles, pick your preference here
Comment Hierarchy: if you're having trouble with threading, especially deep threads, this shows a textual description, for example 2a3d would be the second thread, the first reply to the thread, the third reply to that parent, and the fourth reply to the previous parent. If you can read multiple levels of numbered headings in a list or paper, you'll have practice at this.
Mobile View: Dreamwidth tries to make things mobile friendly on modern pages, but if your device is large enough that it really can display the page like desktop and it's serving you just infuriatingly tiny slices, override that here.
Site Skin: a few options here; there are two with non-expanding menus which helps with no mouse, and Lynx is a really pared down skin that lets your mobile browser do most of the display work.

Mobile tab:
https://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=mobile
This is just for post-by-email, which you may prefer as a mobile client to the site update page, especially if your email handles drafts better. (There have been some drafts improvements, but the main one hasn't been around long enough for me to know how much I trust it yet.)

Shortcuts:
https://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=shortcuts
Do you like using gestures or keyboard commands? Set those here.

Privacy:
https://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=privacy
Minimum entry security: if you would like to post most entries locked but aren't sure how to do that by email, you can set the minimum entry security to set everything to friends-only. (You can edit entries after they've posted to public if you want.)

Beta testing:
https://www.dreamwidth.org/beta
If you'd like to try the new entry page or new inbox design, opt in to those here. I love the new entry page; it performs delightfully for me on mobile. ~~However, it does not have a rich text editor yet, because the RTE is still a bear that needs wrestling in order to get it updated.~~ I am reliably informed that the old janky RTE is in the new entry page as of last code push!

On the new Create Entries page:
https://www.dreamwidth.org/entry/new
Select the Settings gear in order to adjust the number of columns on the page (1 or 2), show and hide panels, and drag panels around until you like the layout.

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Karzilla's Law

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 18:39:37 GMT

In which sgsabbage, kareila, and alierak discuss time. And, inevitably, time zones.

( Read more... )

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Miscellaneous

Mon, 29 Jun 2015 06:40:22 GMT

Feeling not quite as terrible but still under the weather. (poor thermoregulation, poor appetite, some pain)
Not allowed to attempt to pick up strange men at conferences.
Not socially acceptable to inquire about polyamory (see above).
I got into the Lem section at Powell's. Oops.
Still need to unpack car.
Still need to do laundry.
Moderators comparing notes and a strong bunch of them having the same problem with the same person is important.
Slack has pros and cons.
I pointed someone to Crystal Singer at the bookstore.

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You can't always halt a flamewar w/1 raised eyebrow, but it rarely hurts to try. #osb15 #DWgoestoOSB

Thu, 25 Jun 2015 01:46:24 GMT

Today I gave my Community Moderation: you can't always halt a flamewar with one raised eyebrow (but it rarely hurts to try) talk.

I have already identified things that I might do differently next time, but I think it went OK overall and I had a great chat with someone who is currently looking at the fact that one of her communities hasn't got any rules and right now it's an intentional community who all have the same general goals but if Things Happen they wouldn't know where to start.

I always recommend starting with rules or at least general concrete principles that you'd like the community to embody, for the record.

I had fun and I hope everyone else did too, and I sadly ran long enough that there wasn't much time for Q&A. My favorite under-discussed tool is hellbanning.

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test

Mon, 08 Dec 2014 04:56:51 GMT

azurelunatic

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Open source vs. Non-Profit, the food truck edition.

Fri, 05 Sep 2014 08:18:34 GMT

Imagine a cookbook. A cookbook isn't necessarily the best metaphor to use here, because of US copyright law regarding recipes, but then there are some similar US rulings that apply to computer programs' front ends as well. (Since I'm in the US, those are the laws I'm most familiar with.)

The cookbook might be published, with pictures and extensive written instructions on how to assemble the dishes. Anyone who wants to use the cookbook would have to buy a copy, or borrow a copy from someone who had bought it, or perhaps obtain it illegally.

The cookbook might be posted online by the creators, free to read for anyone who had internet to get to it, and free to use for basically whatever. (Though the creators might take a dim view, and a legally supported dim view, of someone else lifting not only the ingredients list, but also the pictures and the writeup, and claiming that they, and not the originators, created all that.)

The cookbook might not be available anywhere outside the creator's kitchen, not for pay and certainly not for free. Those are family recipes! How dare you! Or perhaps it's just something that the creator whipped together -- for fun, or because it needed to happen and they couldn't find it anywhere else -- and hasn't bothered to publish or put up online because it's all just so much bother.

Imagine a place that serves soup and sandwiches. Soup and sandwiches, created on an industrial scale and not just for the family at home, takes some sort of recipe. Recipes which can be found in a cookbook.

It could be a soup kitchen, serving food to whoever comes along hungry and in need.

It could be a restaurant, serving food to whoever comes along with the required amount of cash.

It could be the soup equivalent of Rupert Grint's ice cream truck -- serving food for free to whoever happens to be around because it pleases the establishment to make soup and sandwiches.

Obviously all these establishments need some sort of a recipe. They may have even created cookbooks. But nothing says that the cash-required restaurant has to sell their cookbook for cash, or that the soup kitchen has to only use found-for-free-online recipes. Nothing says that the soup kitchen can't sell a cookbook to raise money. Nothing says that the cash-required restaurant can't release an ebook of their popular recipes for free in case you want to try your hand at them at home.

Just because a particular group uses and builds open source software says jack-all about whether they are a nonprofit. Just because a particular group is a nonprofit says jack-all about whether they use or create open source software.

If Dreamwidth were a food truck, it would use a few recipes which were freely available online, a few recipes which were painstakingly assembled after one of the new chefs blind-taste-tested stuff from another food truck (does the same general thing, but with that special dw-truck twist), and a whole lot of recipes that the chefs developed the hard way. The dw-truck's website would link to the recipes from elsewhere (other open source software), and have an ebook with the rest of the recipes (dw-free). (dw-nonfree is like the fruity drink the chefs sip from time to time -- part of what makes the truck distinctive, but not required at home to make the same recipes.) The soup of the day is hearty and filling and served for free to whoever walks up and asks for a bowl. The bacon and/or truffle chowder, the really good stuff? For that, they charge. And that's what keeps it going. It pleases the establishment to make soup and sandwiches. And it is delicious.

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a vehicle for the transportation of butter

Fri, 05 Sep 2014 07:27:03 GMT

Yay, the team flatscreen was moved with basically no problems. I say basically. The moving crew was really sweet and left a note saying that they couldn't move the mac mini that went with the flatscreen because it was locked down. (This was a known factor.) So after lunch I wandered over to the old place, emailed helpdesk with the basic request, and popped into the local helpdesk office. Local helpdesk recognized me on sight, accepted my authority to request the move, and unlocked the cable for me.

I accidentally started a conversation about bee fellatio in #adventuresofstnono. One of our number discovered a wasp in a work bathroom. She flushed it. I mentioned that I'd accidentally blown a wasp at Purple the other day.

<catmonk> s/at.*//
<azurejanel> that's what she said.
<azurejanel> specifically, three of my friends started speculating about blowing bees
<azurejanel> and that's when I went to wikipedia and learned way too much about bee reproduction

CatMonk took the opportunity to go on a wikidive, reporting various bee facts back to the channel every now and then. It was great.

In one of my less official functions as the maintainer of the team hummingbird feeder, I wound up with some maple drops (hard, rather than the soft maple sugar). I left one with everybody who was in on the team who sits in our wing.

There was an interruption in Dreamwidth service this morning. The root cause was a problem with the DNS; Dreamwidth has now switched DNS providers. There is more detail and explanation in dw_maintenance. And while I am used to describing Dreamwidth to my tech-y, non-internet-fandom friends as "a little open source project, social blogging, a code fork of the formerly open-source LiveJournal" -- the fact is that while the open source project (the codebase) side of Dreamwidth has had code gone live from 26 people in a July-to-July year span, there are some 55,000-odd active users of the Dreamwidth.org social blogging site currently. (Because it's a common misconception, open source is not the same as non-profit. Open source means that the computer code is visible and freely available. A non-profit organization has a specific legal meaning in the US; Dreamwidth Studios LLC is a for-profit company which happens to believe in reinvesting a lot of its profits back into the business and in support of the open source project, which is awesome.)

Hilariously, I tuned out for some of the evening A-Team call about one of the new procurement/travel/expense things while wrestling with the current procurement tool. Woe. Woe and shenanigans.

Mr. Zune asked if he could use one of my sawed-off pool noodles in context of some of the mildly inexplicable UI decisions of the new travel thing, so I popped upstairs for a bit. On my way, I noticed that helpdesk's door was open, so I popped in there, said hi to the guy who'd been off on another project for a while, and left some candy. It so happens that he particularly likes the peanut butter Lindor balls.

Stories which I have told to Mr. Zune include that time that O walloped F with the frickin' clue bat, that time when F didn't heed his oil change light, the time when I hid in F's closet from his parents, the time I changed the water pump in Mama's car. Also, F as compared to Purple, and why I sometimes think of them in the same metacategories. (And, surprising possibly nobody, I like Purple better, because having a good idea of how the world works and occasionally saying asshole things for the sake of humor is generally less harmful than having no idea how the world works and holding opinions which range from hurtful to harmful because we don't live in the ideal world.)

That dude dropped by Mr. Zune's office to summon him over to look at a thing when he had a minute. He complimented me on the reflector on my work badge. I explained the reflector treatment that my canes usually get, and cautioned the guy about the maniacs in the parking lot. The guy said that he knew of a particular maniac -- him! I alerted him about the big white van that cuts across the rows in a most unsettling and high speed way.

There was a notification of some more inexplicable than usual shenanigans.

Purple is not opposed to maple candy, but a little is enough because it's usually so very sweet. "This is good! Now if only there were a stack of pancakes to go under it..." That resulted in us discussing butter candy, and how you would make it. I pointed out that butterscotch is a thing which exists. Purple waved that off, and the eventual theoretical confection is composed of liquid clarified butter inside solid butter inside butterfinger inside butterscotch. (There was a discussion about the nature of Werther's, in which I exasperatedly laid out the Venn Diagram wherein butterscotch contains Werther's.)

After various discussion of food cravings, I got pho for dinner. It was delicious.

There's a new Seanan book which I must get my hands on. Perhaps this weekend.

I am attempting to reclaim my bachelor pad from the depths of Foul Bachelorette Frog territory. There's some visible progress. Latest has involved some lingerie bags, which should help both with the issue where underwear gets strewn about the bathroom until laundry day, and the issue where bras get twisted and snag on things, and elastic gets unraveled and ties up everything into a really hilarious knot that Noah would be proud of.

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Quotes database engines

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 03:02:39 GMT

One of the things I learned at Open Source Bridge was that the idea of having a private quotes database was a novel idea to many projects. Some people asked after the source for the one which Dreamwidth is using. sophie hasn't (yet?) put that up, but there are various open quotes database projects out there (note that I have not used any of these myself):

Open Source Quotes DataBase: http://sourceforge.net/projects/osqdb/ (et al)
miniqdb: https://code.google.com/p/miniqdb/ (uses .htaccess for authentication)
rash-qdb-fork: https://github.com/paxed/rash-qdb-fork (this seems to be the actively developed fork)
t3quotes: http://typo3.org/extensions/repository/view/t3quotes
QuoteBoat QDB: http://www.ohloh.net/p/quoteboatqdb
Chirpy!: http://chirpy.sourceforge.net/

If you're looking to get your project set up with a quotes database, check some of those out and see if they have what your project needs.

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Two conferences in two weeks: the sketchy outline version

Tue, 01 Jul 2014 07:33:15 GMT

Because if I don't post this now, I probably won't manage to.

14:53 2014-06-29

Congratulations to Shawn for arriving at 34 years of age alive and with a lovely family. (If I've missed some horrible announcement on Facebook, I'm going to feel really really bad.)

My dad called; he's proud of my presentation. He's also given Tay and her young man his blessing (whatever that means). (The "whatever that means" was part of the blessing, not my interpretation on it.)

Work conference:
Wednesday I already talked about.

Thursday: somewhat more subdued! I arrived at a still-early hour, because traffic. I was gratified to see that umbrellas had popped up like mushrooms over the patio, overnight. Breakfast was happily shaded.

I stepped out to keep an eye out for the arriving executive, who I described as a tall thinnish white guy with a pointy nose and a wheelie bag. There are at least two such, and that guy wasn't the one.

Then I was distracted by the state of the patio. As the earth rotates, the attitude of the sun in relation to the tables and umbrellas inevitably had changed. By the time the facilities dudes arrived, the events lady and I had wrestled three out of the original six umbrellas into the best new position. The facilities dudes took care of the remaining three, and brought a seventh.

After lunch, I went to the How To Talk To Product Teams breakout, which was a helpful airing of some of the process and communications grievances, and ideas for working on it.

The closing guests were from True&Co. Their talk was delightful, but their product made me openly weep, because I'm not in their size range and I really wish they served my bra size.

Chairwoman Sparkles closed the conference and then it was all over but the cleanup. Since we wish to be allowed to use the auditorium again, we found it prudent to pre-clean so the cleaning crew would not find it entirely trashed. Which we did.

I drove back around to our buildings, dropped some things off at my cube, and then poked my head in Purple's office. Purple kindly allowed me to meep and flail for a while. Apparently I did not sound quite as pathetic as I felt. Then, traffic having died down some, I conclude that I must have gone home.

Friday: not content to just curl up in my bed all day, I went to the Skype building to participate in some user research on an adjacent offering from Microsoft. I had many things to say, but I can't talk about them. The researcher knew my Overlady from earlier days. I offered to make the attempt to introduce the researcher to the team at work who is rolling out a product, for some more in-depth research, if they wind up working things out.

The researcher had to go back to reset the room for the next session, and I wandered outside, where the afternoon shift receptionist hailed me from where he was standing around on break. One brief and surreal conversation later, he had my email address and the dates I'd next be likely to be free for coffee or something (July 4th weekend).

Work was mostly trying to get stuff done so the rest could wait until I was back from osbridge.

Open Source Bridge was a thing which happened!

Saturday: Packing. Cleaning. Picking up my new glasses from Costco. Going to bed with a sick headache, possibly due to the new glasses.

Sunday: Cleaning mostly canceled on the grounds that kaberett had to go straight back to the UK rather than come to SF. Packing continued.

Monday: driving. Lots of driving.

Tuesday: first day, and terrified laptop problems. Costco run. Meet Bell.

Wednesday: all the slides, presenting, and fun!

Thursday: the other two talks from my group, and buttons, and dinner. I snagged some of Kat's calamari. It was good.

Friday: sleep, unconference, and dinner. I snagged some of Kat's calamari. It was good. Arranging the transfer from Guardian to Bell.

Saturday: leisurely departure, and ALL THE DRIVING. Followed by a nap.

Sunday: Having awoken from the nap, still driving! And then home. And sleep. And my dad called! And errands! And calling Darkside, and him calling back. :) On meeting a certain geek celebrity: "Have you seen [show], where [titular character] makes an appearance?" "Ego the size of a small spaceship?" "Maybe not a small one."

Other entries:

http://kareila.dreamwidth.org/917829.html

Monday: catching up on things at work. Purple's officemate is clearly Spiders Georg, who works in a cave in Palo Alto. (This, because ( spiders, not officemate's fault ).) Gave Purple one of the two little plain purple buttons. He did not question why he was being given a purple button, because he knew.

lololol:

Tracing route to www.livejournal.com [208.93.0.150]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 * General failure.

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2nd Thursday, osbridge proposals, and a dying hard drive.

Sat, 12 Apr 2014 11:46:40 GMT

2nd Thursday happened. Nothing caught on fire. I like it when things don't catch on fire. I sat down with the magic pen and the computer on Wednesday night and made another whack at seeing if I could get it to autotranscribe my handwriting.

Reader, it turns out that the magic pen talks to OneNote.
The magic pen has talked to OneNote since 2012.
Poor Purple got to hear most of the cursing. There was a lot of it.

( Read more... )

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j/k (but not just kidding)

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 06:47:53 GMT

HEY TUMBLR USERS.

Enjoy using j/k to hit previous/next entries on your dashboard? Wish there was something like that for Dreamwidth?

For the low, low price of $0 + Chrome + Tampermonkey, you can beta test just this userscript!

Flamebyrd has put together a thing.

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I'd forgotten a lot about this book.

Sat, 07 Dec 2013 22:07:35 GMT

I'm unsure whether the collection of #dreamwidth IRC channels is a karass or granfalloon, but the wampeter is definitely Dreamwidth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokononism

(Related: my chat the other night with lb, who invited me back to his place, for values of "his place" involving an IRC channel he founded aaaaaaages ago, where there is no topic and the channel name has essentially fuckall to do with the current use. I feel very accepted: it doesn't seem like this is a thing he does for everyone.)

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Do you hear ... ?

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:12:34 GMT

So it turns out that I do know "Do You Hear The People Sing" well enough to sing along with the chorus, thanks to Summer Fine Arts Camp and my general time spent around various musical theatre types. (And I have a difficult time not singing along to "I Dreamed a Dream" because while I was not in the actual musicals, I spent the better part of my youth in various choirs.) I discovered this on the phone with zarhooie the other night, where by "the other night" I am pretty sure it was around the end of April, because hilarity directly began to ensue.

And then the bottom fell out of my schedule because conference and also conference.

But the conference is now over.

Do you hear the bloggers sing
Singing a song of angry fen
Heave-ho, hoist up the colors
We'll not be struck-through again
When the posting of your gif
Reveals they all reload as one
There is a site about to start
When tomorrow comes!

(Musical note: you either have to sing "heave" on two notes or skip a note to make it work, and go fast-and-light on "we'll not" and really hammer "be" to make it scan right.)

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Happy Birthday, Dreamwidth

Wed, 01 May 2013 06:33:29 GMT

Time zones? What are time zones?

So four years ago today, give or take whichever end of the day we're talking about, I was sitting on this very internet (if not this very computer), excited, thrilled, terrified, and amazingly restless, waiting for the Open Beta to commence.

We ordered pizza for the Faultless Pajama Foundry apartment where Dreamwidth's owners and spice were huddled, waiting to make sure everything went off without a hitch.

There were some bobbles. Mark oopsed the website at least once. There was a problem with the shop and there was another seed account sale for people who didn't get a chance the first time around.

It was incredible.

Like zarhooie said, we probably wouldn't want to go through all that again, but oh my god. It was amazing. I have met so many excellent people, including and especially zarhooie -- I gave her my phone number so she could call to keep company and keep safe on the road when she was headed somewhere or other, and then suddenly we were inseparable. I was thinking "Who is this Kat person and how come she is always on my phone?" and then we were braintwins. I wouldn't trade her. ♥

Here's to another four and beyond.

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Real Adult Professionals Forget Things.

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 05:11:04 GMT

(Also on Things Real Dreamwidth Programmers Do.)

I filed a bug at work today. This is how that went:

First, I noticed a little glitch with the Move Message dialog, which had been bugging me subconsciously for weeks, and just then floated to the top. I thought maybe I should file a help ticket, but thought that I'd filed enough help tickets for a while and this was minor, so I might as well save them the trouble and look for duplicates first.

So I went to that product's bug tracker and searched for the most obvious keyword, which had 400 results. So I added the next most obvious keyword, which narrowed it down to about 90. Then I went down the list and started opening things in tabs, including two that by their titles looked like they might be duplicates of each other, but were entirely unrelated to what I was complaining about.

After that, I read through the tabs I'd just opened, and found nothing that looked like the bug I was encountering. Then I looked at the two that might have been duplicates of each other, and found that they were in fact nothing at all alike except in the title. Then I looked at some of the other bugs that could have been duplicates of those, but those weren't very interesting.

Reading through all those bugs had given me another couple useful keywords to try, so I tried that and got only about 10. Those were really quick to read through, so I did. And I closed the last tab from the bug tracker.

Then I closed the help page, because I couldn't remember why I'd opened it, and obviously it was not for any good reason if I couldn't remember.

Then I went back to my email and noticed that for some reason I'd stopped in the middle of moving a message. "Huh, that's weird," I thought.

I looked briefly at the message to figure out where I wanted to move it. I looked at the dialog, which had been recently changed to retain the last folder that I'd moved something to, in case I was doing it a lot. I noticed that I couldn't see the highlight, and couldn't remember what it was. "That's obnoxious, I should file a bug," I said; "I can never remember anything like that longer than 30 seconds."

I opened up a tab for a helpdesk ticket, and then realized what I'd just done.

Yesterday I'd described my workflows to a dev as "Imagine severe ADHD, and people banging pots and pans in the background", and I stand by that description.

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#dreamwidth-dev: silliness: like a game of Clue

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 07:19:22 GMT

( Read more... )

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Angry Network Admins Happen

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 20:12:59 GMT

So there was a Dreamwidth outage last night! denise explains what happened in dw_maintenance (which is worth subscribing to if you enjoy knowing what's coming up in terms of planned site outages, and what just happened when there's an unplanned one), and ServerBeach explains in more detail.

On February 12 at 00:00 CT, PEER 1 Hosting’s Network Operations Center (NOC) was alerted to loss of connectivity on multiple transport circuits that connect our San Antonio Data Center to our node in Dallas. Network Engineers were immediately mobilized to investigate the issue locally, while in parallel the Network Operations Center began following up with our transport circuit providers for more information.

The transport circuits that connect Dallas and San Antonio are supplied by different providers, and are specified as running on diverse fiber paths. Continuing our investigation, the Network Operations Center was able to determine that the connectivity loss was the result of a fiber maintenance being performed by an underlying long-haul carrier, for which PEER 1 Hosting was not notified. At 03:30 CT, the first transport circuit came back online, which fully restored network connectivity to the San Antonio Data Center.

At the moment it is unclear how separate providers with previously diverse circuits paths would both be impacted by the same fiber work. We will be following up with our San Antonio transport providers and assessing how this scope of work had the impact that it did and then take appropriate action to ensure circuit redundancy is reinstituted. Additionally, PEER 1 Hosting will be doing an audit of the current fiber paths being used throughout our transport links to ensure full network redundancy is available in all locations.

There are some phrases in there that just stood out to me as indicative of a highly trained network admin keeping very tight control on their temper, so this is how I read it:

WHAT THE FUCK. THIS ISN'T SUPPOSED TO FUCKING HAPPEN. YOU FUCKERS ARE USING THE SAME FIBER. WHY ARE YOU FUCKERS USING THE SAME FIBER. YOU FUCKERS TOLD ME YOU WERE NOT USING THE SAME FIBER. NOW I'M GOING TO HAVE TO HAPPEN TO YOU FUCKERS. YOU FUCKERS HAD BETTER HAVE A GREAT EXPLANATION. IF YOU FUCKERS DO NOT STOP USING THE SAME FIBER, WE'LL BE EVEN MORE NOT-HAPPY THAN WE ALREADY ARE. BELIEVE YOU ME, YOU FUCKERS WILL NOT LIKE US WHEN WE'RE NOT HAPPY. ANY OF YOU OTHER FUCKERS WHO HAVE SHIFTED WHAT FIBER YOU'RE USING WITHOUT TELLING US, YOU'RE ON NOTICE. WE WILL BE POKING OUR NOSES INTO ALL OF YOU FUCKERS' BUSINESS. FUCK IT, I'M GOING TO BED, BECAUSE IT'S SIX THE FUCK IN THE MORNING, AND NONE OF YOU FUCKERS HAD BETTER PAGE ME ANY TIME BEFORE THREE.

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The wrong kind of encouragement: a fairytale of development

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 08:23:32 GMT

Once upon a time, when Dreamwidth was still new and Dreamhacks were just the best thing since sliced bread and even more new than Dreamwidth itself, a developer^* came unto the Dreamwidth IRC channel. Now, most new developers who came to the channel had similar plans of development to each other, and wanted to get started writing patches as fast as possible, so I am afraid that the denizens of the channel had started to become sloppy and make too many assumptions about the plans of all new developers, because most were so much the same.

"Can anyone help me install a local version of the Dreamwidth code onto my server?" the developer asked.

"Hail!" the IRC channel greeted.

"A new developer! Hooray! You don't have to install the code on your local server," one channel denizen, a great and honored developer with many bugs to their name, said. "We have Dreamhacks, and this is how you apply for them!"

"Thank you," the developer said, and went away. For that was not the question the developer had been asking, but the channel members were so nice and helpful.

Presently the developer came unto IRC again. "Can anyone help me install a local version of the Dreamwidth code onto my server?" the developer asked again.

"We're so glad you want to help out!" another channel denizen said (having not been there the first time, or perhaps having been away from the keyboard). This denizen was only a middling developer, but showed great promise and had already vanquished some bugs. "Installing the Dreamwidth codebase is very hard, and is very frustrating for a new developer. Here is where you can apply for a Dreamhack."

"Thank you, but --" the developer said, and then went away again. This was still not the question the developer had been asking, although the channel denizen was right: installing the code was very hard.

And a third time, the developer came unto IRC. "Can anyone help me install a local version of the Dreamwidth code onto my server?" the developer asked, greatly weary and sad.

"I don't know much about that process," a third channel denizen said. This denizen was one of the least among the developers, but had been watching the first two times the new developer came in and asked. "I saw that you were offered a Dreamhack twice before, but that was not your question."

"No, I don't want a Dreamhack," the developer said, relieved that at last someone seemed to be answering the actual question. "I was not sure how to ask, and everyone was trying to be so helpful. I am on a quest for enlightenment, and I would like the experience of installing it all for myself."

"I hope you may find the enlightenment you are looking for," said the third denizen. "I do not think I can help you myself, but if you encounter trouble, try the wiki, for it is always there, though it does not have much yet." And the third denizen named some pages.

"If you encounter trouble that the wiki cannot handle, try asking my first sister." And the third denizen named a system administrator of middling wisdom and middling availability.

"And if you encounter trouble that my first sister cannot handle, try asking my second sister. But beware, you may have to wait a long time." And the third denizen named a system administrator of great wisdom but small availability.

"Thank you!" the developer said with joy. "I had almost given up, for I feared no one would answer my question. I will try the wiki first."

And in later times, many stories were told of the brave feats of installation that the developer mastered, and then documented for developers yet to come.

* This is a fairytale based on an actual incident. I'm leaving the developer here anonymous; this developer can of course step up and say "Hi, that was me!" but I'd like to leave them the option of doing so, rather than giving them potentially unwanted attention. ^back

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Goodreads widget

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 14:16:49 GMT

I can't remember who it was who wanted this, but changelog advises that code is checked in to whitelist some of the goodreads widgets. The JavaScriptier ones are likely to remain not fully working, however.

There's a code push planned for early next week, after which that will likely go live.

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Conceptual tests for Dreamwidth design/coding

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:10:58 GMT

The master conceptual tests at Dreamwidth are, I believe, the Design Personas.

There are a number of other conceptual tests that long-time Dreamwidth (and LiveJournal) code/design/suggestions participants run against proposed features or implementations. I hope to collect some of them here, and maybe start a wiki page at some point, because this is the sort of stuff that's retained in the tribal knowledge pool, and is therefore vulnerable to the problems of human memory and absence.

* Went to Costa Rica with the Peace Corps (prolonged absence, with or without notice).
How does the proposed feature or implementation affect a user who is away from both their account, and any possible notifications, for prolonged times? In particular, any feature that depends on a user responding to a prompt within say a six-month deadline, with irreversible effects that include data loss, is just not on. christine is the old LJ Support test case: she was previously an active volunteer, and planned her long absence beforehand. She periodically returns and updates us all on her life! She's generally away from her journal a year or two at a time, with no means of access in between.

* Deceased (with or without memorial status) user.
How does it affect (the readers/circle of) a user who will never return? The friends/family of a deceased user may or may not choose to ask for memorial status for that account, so assuming that all accounts belonging to deceased users will have been given memorial status is not a safe assumption.

* Dead Manta Problems
How does it interact with deleted-and-purged accounts, particularly ones who have had the old name reactivated by someone having renamed to it? (Named in honor of the once-and-again deadmantalks, whose old name became ex_deadmanta-some-numbers upon reclaiming the name.)

* Unwanted Contact
How could this be used, either by accident or with malice aforethought, to cause communication between parties who should not communicate with each other? Will it need to restrict anonymous or not-logged-in use or respect ban settings?

* Spam
How could this be used by a spammer?

* Scalability
Consider the potential load if the entire population of the site should use it, or if a large number of users were to use the feature at its highest capacity. For example, what if this feature were used by a high-traffic roleplaying game? (This is usually a developer/architect level problem.)

* Paid Features
Is this a feature that requires a lot of expensive operations? Could this be offset by restricting it (or higher levels of it) to paying users? Would extending a higher level of it to paying users be a nice perk for them? (This is ultimately a staff decision.)

* Malice Aforethought
How could this be used to disrupt others' use of the site? Could any of it be avoided by built-in safeguards or rules, rather than moderation after the fact?

* Journal Types
How does this apply to regular users, communities, and identity users? Does it apply to only one journal type, or can it be usefully used by more?

* Settings Overload
More settings are possibly great for power users, but can cause decision fatigue in neophyte to intermediate users who just want things to work. D has a whole essay on this somewhere, I think.

* Opt-In vs. Opt-Out
Opt-out makes features more discoverable (I think D has an essay on this too), which means that the default state of new features should not piss off, injure (migraine or seizure trigger), or endanger (publish or publicize previously private or covert information such as location or wallet name) users who have not yet turned it off.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some stuff, so if there are other things that either are or should be stuff that gets discussed when talking about a new feature, please feel free to add it in the comments, or in the wiki page once someone builds that.

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This is a screed on the basic nature of modern blog architecture, at possibly 101 level.

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:34:37 GMT

Why does one entry appear on many different pages? If I want to link to an entry, what page should I link to?

Most modern blog sites and formats allow a blogger to write an entry once, post it, and then have it automatically show up in several different places. Depending on how fucking stupid the blog engine is *cough*Tumblr*cough*, it may be difficult to figure out which copy is the "master" copy, and how to link to it so that people from the future can find it too.

Let's use Dreamwidth as an example. This entry, being public, will show up in a bunch of places:

( Read more... )

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The more we know!

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:45:22 GMT

The canonical answer to a lot of the "inherited from our code parent" legacy code/design decision questions is: "Brad, in his dorm room, with BML."

Tags are, factually speaking, Mark and Mahlon, in the office, pair-programming.

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Importing your LiveJournal to Dreamwidth as a private backup

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 22:13:29 GMT

Have a LiveJournal with years of entries and comments you'd really like backed up elsewhere in case of ... stuff.

Refrain from using the LiveJournal mass privacy edit tool. (Last I heard, use of the tool would put entries into a state that could not be imported through conventional means.)

Know your LiveJournal username and password.

If necessary, reset your LiveJournal password if it is lost, or if you know your LiveJournal password but want to give Dreamwidth a temporary one, reset your LiveJournal password using the old one.

Have (or create) a Dreamwidth account.

On Dreamwidth, set Organize: Manage Account: Privacy: Minimum Entry Security to "Just Me (Private)". This will ensure that the imported entries are set to Private as they come in.

On Dreamwidth, use the Organize: Import Content tool: select LiveJournal, then enter your LiveJournal username and password.

Proceed with the import.

Wait for the import to finish.

Once the import has finished, restore the Dreamwidth Organize: Manage Account: Privacy: Minimum Entry Security to your regular setting.

If you used a temporary password for the import, reset your LiveJournal password to something you will remember long-term.

If you are the maintainer of a LiveJournal community, you can use basically the same process to privately back up your community, even if you don't want to fully migrate.

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#dreamwidth developer pep talk

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:48:06 GMT

(this is long.)

2/13/2012

[09:51] <ursamajor> it helps that we have others around here who have been marinating in this stuff for years if not decades to help supplement
[09:52] <ursamajor> but it takes awhile to *get* to that deep understanding, and there's a whole bunch of intermediate understandings to go through in between.

[09:52] <ursamajor> plus it's often easier to communicate to a layman's understanding while you're not too far past layman yourself :)
[09:53] <shadowspar> believe me, when you feel like you have a good grip, on, say, perl, there's nothing like going to a conference with all the Lords Of The Perl Planet to make you feel like a dumbass again.
[09:53] <denise> yeah, i never know what i know until i try to teach it
[09:53] <shadowspar> I speak from personal experience.
[09:53] <denise> (or to brainstorm something with it)

[09:53] <denise> like, i keep startling myself because i make what i think are stupid suggestions to mark and he says "hey, that'd work!"
( Read more... )

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Shiny things are shiny! OpenID comment claiming beta!

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:45:27 GMT

The newest, shiniest, and hilariously-beta-shenaniganed feature of them all is here!

http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid/claim

Yep, claim your OpenID comments with your DW journal. Once you have claimed an OpenID account, comments left by that account (already posted, on subsequent imports, and possibly even comments left when you wander around logged in as it) will appear as left by your main account. (This is a step towards merging/linked journals, and it's amazing funtimes.) (I am incoherent with sleep dep. I wanted to post this before falling over on my face.)

This is the "mark was up until 3am and zombified coding and fixing the stuff we discovered that wasn't working" level beta, so if you're not down with beta shenanigans, hang back and watch the rest of us discover hilarious things like problems with primary keys that were a little too narrowly defined, or that thing with the userpics that rainne ran into. (That should be resolved. If you see weird keywords associated with comments, like you know you did not use that userpic AND YET SOMEHOW...!!, holler. This is the sort of hilarious fun that goes down in IRC over the North American night.)

It's not linked on the site yet, because it's so very new-beta; not sure whether it'll go through the betafeatures page or whether it'll go directly live after initial testing is over.

Procedure:

Make sure you're logged in to the home site for your OpenID under the correct account. For example, when claiming my OpenID comments as azurelunatic.livejournal.com, I need to be logged in to LiveJournal as azurelunatic, not as garnetdagger or any other random journal.

Make sure you're logged in to Dreamwidth as the correct journal (your actual Dreamwidth journal, not the OpenID, and the correct journal if you have more than one of those).
Visit http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid/claim and enter the OpenID location of the account whose comments you want to claim. For my LJ, this would be azurelunatic.livejournal.com

Double-check to make sure that it's right and you're not accidentally claiming all your fannish comments with your work journal, unless you're into that.

Press the happy little button. Depending on what you've told the OpenID provider to do about Dreamwidth, the following may happen: a) blink and wham it's a message saying that you'll get an email in about an hour (you already told the OpenID provider to always authenticate you to DW), b) you'll go to the OpenID provider's site and get a message asking whether you want to affirm that it's you -- forever, once, or cancel that shit, c) you'll get told to log in/log in to the right-ass account, d) DW will tell you sorrowfully that it couldn't find enough information to get you logged in.
- (If you have a custom style at LJ or wherever, this can sometimes fuck with OpenID authenticating right. OpenID depends on a little snippet of invisible code being in the right place to say, hi, it's really me, go talk to the right bit of LJ's computer to prove it. Fixing that is a little beyond the scope of what I know how to do, but swapping to a regular system style which presumably has that shit in place may help, if that's the problem.)
Wait for a while. (This wait may not be the full hour, but it's not immediate on purpose -- since it would be a ball of petrified yarn to untangle, it shouldn't be easy to do accidentally if it was not intentional.)

Get the email. Confirm that all of the everything is right. Click the confirmation link if it is.

Wham! Your comments as left by the OpenID should start to show up as left by your DW account that you just linked it up with. If icon information was imported with the comments, and you have an icon of that keyword on DW now, your icons should start to show, which is pretty spiffy. (Of course, in my case, the second time around when I was setting things up to claim my IJ account, I ran into Fun At 2am With Primary Keys, and went off to go tell Mark what he'd coded.)

This is still beta-y, and it is now Monday morning so Mark won't have a chance to actively go bang on deep code for a while (given that he has a day job until such time as DW can hire him back at supporting-a-family-in-the-Bay-Area experienced dev rates) but if you notice problems or whatever. So there is plenty of time to figure out how it breaks and notice problems. (I'm not sure where the best place to shout out about problems on this one would be, nor refinements/enhancements. Not sure that there's a central place for that yet, as there is no official announcement save the buglog.)

omg this is aawwwweesome. :D

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