Code Tour: 25 August to 5 September, 2011

[metawidget]

Good afternoon, Dreamwidth! I'll be driving denise’s car your code tour past things fixed in the past week and a half (helpfully identified by the code tour script). We will be going by old bugs, new bugs and a new feature: 11 tickets closed in all, by fu, rb, allen, kareila, exor674 and denise, with the help of people egging them on, adding information to tickets and making suggestions. This feels mostly like a tour of things fixed or made right, but there’s likely something for everyone (polls! user heads! usability! accessibility! media players! code nitpicks!) in this tour’s ménagerie.

The last code push completed on the 26th, so most of these changes are waiting in the wings for the next one.

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Bug 1777: Error pages for security and tags
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: fu
Description: When someone tried to access http://metawidget.dreamwidth.org/tag/blarglefoo (and I don't have a “blarglefoo” tag), they currently get an ugly minimalist error page. cesi suggested the error be made pretty, and fu made it pretty by helpfully displaying a list of tags that does exist, which is pretty and should help the user find the tag they are looking for.

Bug 3836: hello-world div ID
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: rb
Description: “Hello World” is a phrase that should be used once per programmer per programming language, and probably not as the ID of a div actually related to Google Analytics. rb changed it to the much more sensible “statistics.”

Bug 3286: Style Comments Page with Outline Indicators in Place of Indents
Category: Site Layout/Navigation
Suggested by: jesse_the_k
Patch by: allen
Description: This new feature resulted from a thoroughly thought-out suggestion from jesse_the_k. Indentation in comment threads carries information: who is responding to who. If you are using a browser that doesn't do indentation, or a large-type browser where indents get huge very fast, this can be a problem. If you get animated discussions in comment threads you read and lose track of the indentations on your regular old Firefox browser at 12pt, this could be a problem for you, too. jesse_the_k proposed visible outline indicators that make the comments thread look a little like legal or technical documentation (1, 1a, 1b, 1b1, 1b2, 2, 2a, etc.) and make sure presentation isn't the only source of comment threading information. Next code push, thanks to allen, optional visible outline indicators will be available in site-schemed comments pages.

Bug 3814: soundcloud.com embeds not embedded correctly
Category: Journal contents
Patch by: fu
Description:

ninetydegrees:

The player is truncated.

(Sounds of fixing and committing by fu in the background)

Bug 3870: Add alt attribute for locked icon on entries in style=light
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Suggested by: faithofone
Patch by: rb
Description: The little lock icons in various places (including style=light pages) was missing alt text (which makes them audible for screen readers, visible for text-only users and people on very slow connections, and tool-tippy for the tool-tip-enabled). This patch inserts informative alt text on all little lock icons.

Bug 2010: Preserve journal style/app style preference
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Suggested by: allchildren
Patch by: kareila
Description: When changing styles, allchildren noticed that the “view in my style” option kept getting reset. kareila fixed it.

Bug 3912: style=mine not working on journal pages
Category: Style System
Patch by: exor674
Description: Unfortunately, somewhere in the code, “mine” got to be from the perspective of the journal being viewed, rather than the user setting the option “style=mine” in the URL. exor674 noticed this and fixed it.

Bug 733: Extend DW::External::User to discover account type and save it
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: kareila
Description: This bug was open for a long time and involved a lot of people fixing things and making suggestions. As of next code push, Dreamwidth will make some serious efforts to work out whether an off-site journal is a user or a community, affix the appropriate user icon, and then cache the decision so that the remote site only gets looked at once (thus making Dreamwidth a good Internet neighbour).

Bug 2348: Spam Reports: mode=view should have link to journal of suspected spammer
Category: Site Administration
Suggested by: azurelunatic
Patch by: denise
Description: When spam originates from a DW or OpenID account, the spam team will now have a clickable link to see what journal is associated with the accused spam account as well as the account where the spam was popping up.

Bug 3925: Per-user poll votes not being fetched when the voter is on a different cluster than journal
Category: Journal contents
Patch by: fu
Description: Um, polls, clusters… I gather the clusters weren’t communicating quite right on some shiny new poll features, and now fu has stepped in as mediator and established meaningful dialogue.

Bug 3915: style=mine not working when user has no style set
Category: Journal contents
Patch by: fu
Description: Ack, I think I just found an edge case… — fu.

The “style=mine” option failed to do anything when viewing a journal whose owner has never, ever touched the journal style settings — there was no style to override, sort of. Now, it will do the right thing and style the page.

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You may have noticed a new “Suggested by:” line on some of the bugs, giving credit to users who clicked on the "Make a Suggestion" link and brought something to the attention of the developers. There is a hackathon on targeting suggestion-based patches, so expect to see more of that field in the near future!

Comments

[ninetydegrees]

Next code push, thanks to [personal profile] allen, optional visible outline indicators will be available in site-schemed comments pages.

This is live actually, as are all the other bugs listed here I think. I'm using and loving the indicators! *g*

[fairestcat]

Ahahahaha. I knew sooner or later you'd get roped into doing one of these :D

*smooches*

[unixronin]

I don't know if it's related to the last code push or not, but something appears to have changed since I last posted to my account two days ago which is causing LogJam to fail to post to Dreamwidth, reporting an internal server error. It does not APPEAR to be a LogJam problem.

[denise]

Can you open up a support request for that, along with whatever information you can gather on the problem? (ie: are there any error messages in the logs, if so what's the text, are you able to post to your account through the web client, etc)

We didn't make any changes to the protocol in this code push that might have prompted that, to the best of my knowledge, but the more information you can provide, the better chance of figuring out what's up!

[unixronin]

I've poked into it a little further, and ... it appears to be content-sensitive. I've tried whittling bits out of the post that fails, little by little, and see if I can identify where the problem is. It'll usually post by the time I get each paragraph (or sometimes all but one paragraph) of the post cut down to the single word "test". There's not a lot of useful output, unfortunately; "requesting challenge", "submitting request", "server error", all within maybe a second. I can post fine throuygh the web interface, including the full exact post (exact in all details) I was trying to post through LogJam.

"And is a puzzlement!"

[denise]

Huh. The only thing I could suggest at this point is trying the post with another downloaded client, and if that succeeds, contact LogJam's developers? I got nothin'.

Maybe support will be able to troubleshoot some more!

[unixronin]

FYI, I think I've narrowed it down to a possible charset inconsistency problem.

(I am a LogJam developer, which is why I'm working on trying to identify the problem. The good news is, I think I can kill several birds with one stone if I can get this sorted out, and significantly improve Dreamwidth support in Logjam.)

[denise]

Oooh, awesome.

[zaluzianskya]

Bug 733: Extend DW::External::User to discover account type and save it

THANK YOU!

[sophie]

You may have noticed a new “Suggested by:” line on some of the bugs...

That's actually not new any more! It was introduced in November 2010. The page is misleading, sorry about that! I'll edit it to make sure it doesn't say that it's new.

[edit: Also, looking at it, it seems that the automatic detection of the usernames for it isn't working any more. I'll go fix that, too.]

[edit 2: All fixed! The code tour generator actually properly detects the suggested usernames now as it should. My apologies that it didn't work when you did this one and that you had to do the work yourself!]