dw_dev | Recent Entries

I threw up a post on

dw_beta soliciting feedback for the conversion-with-some-redesign of the home page that's live on the canary server now, but I figured I'd crosspost it here too :)

momijizukamori

So we've required files to be tidied using perltidy since 2019, buuuuut I am terrible at remembering to manually do it, so! I threw together a quick'n'dirty way of automatically running tidy on commit. It's based on this example from the Prettier docs (Prettier is like perltidy but for CSS/JS/HTML).

Here's the perl variant of the script:

#!/bin/sh
FILES=$(git diff --cached --name-only --diff-filter=ACMR | sed 's| |\\ |g')
[ -z "$FILES" ] && exit 0

# Prettify all selected files
echo "$FILES" | xargs tidyall

# Add back the modified/prettified files to staging
echo "$FILES" | xargs git add

exit 0

This also has the bonus that it only tidies files you added to your commit, so you don't end up with rogue changes in files you didn't touch because someone else forgot to tidy before a branch got merged!

EDIT:

kareila rightfully pointed out that I didn't actually specify the install instructions (they're in the linked Prettier docs but, uh, that's not that intuitive). This script should go in the file .git/hooks/pre-commit, and that file needs to be executable, which you can do on the commandline by running chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-commit

karzilla

We're not sure yet exactly when, but sometime in the next few days, we'll do a code push!

You can see what's new in the code tour that was posted earlier today, but here are the highlights:

Google Analytics v4 support
adding the legacy RTE to the beta Create Entries page
adding draft autosave to the beta Create Entries page
more UI improvements for the beta Inbox
some more aggressive measures for discouraging SEO spam accounts
miscellaneous modernization updates for various journal styles
many newly added sites for profile links, content embeds, and username styling
new color picker for the journal style customization page
new CSS wrappers to allow styling of entry cut links

alierak just pushed these changes to the canary server if you want to get a head start on checking out what's new! Feel free to leave a comment here if anything looks weird, or chat with us on our Discord server.

ilyena_sylph

Hello Interwebs!

It is time for a code tour again, and I'm the fool that volunteered to do it! (I'm pretty sure the devs would almost prefer I didn't, because I have to ask so many questions, but it's kind of fun anyway. Part of the time, I even learn things!)

Our amazing devs have been hard at work to make things better for everyone, here are some of the recent/upcoming changes for your perusal!

( so many fixes! )

58 total issues resolved
Contributors:

alierak,

kareila,

momijizukamori,

rahaeli, all of whom are awesome.

And warmest of welcomes to new contributor

cmho!!! Thank you for the fixes!

kareila

Every once in a while, I run through

changelog compiling a list of who has been contributing patches to our code repository, with the understanding that this is not a competition, or any sort of "high score" list. It's intended as a guide for casual developers, to discern not only our most prolific contributors, but also those who have contributed to the project most recently and therefore would be more likely to provide a timely, informed response to development questions. That is why the list is sorted by "Latest" instead of "Changes".

In general, one commit on Github equals one point in the "Changes" column, but fractional points are awarded for collaborative efforts — the most common example being a new S2 theme, where usually half credit is awarded to the theme author and the other half to the person who converts the theme into a code patch. Due to the nature of development, some changes are massive contributions of new code, and others are tiny tweaks; there is no correlation with the amount of effort involved. We are grateful to everyone who helps to improve Dreamwidth, in ways large or small.

I last compiled this list in January of 2023. Since that time, we have welcomed

vivtek as a new contributor! Congratulations and thank you again!

  #  User                      Changes     Latest
  1. momijizukamori             340.16     Tue May 30 22:46:02 2023 UTC
  2. kareila                    1582.5     Wed May 17 02:26:13 2023 UTC
  3. mark                        806.5     Thu Apr 06 05:51:43 2023 UTC
  4. vivtek                          1     Mon Feb 13 18:48:36 2023 UTC
  5. alierak                      51.5     Tue Nov 22 17:06:04 2022 UTC
  6. alansill                        2     Tue Nov 22 15:47:35 2022 UTC
  7. chebegeek                       3     Wed Oct 26 01:30:42 2022 UTC
  8. rmholsen                        1     Fri Jun 17 19:28:18 2022 UTC
  9. batrachian                     19     Mon Jan 17 19:44:30 2022 UTC
 10. martindemello                   4     Thu Aug 12 04:59:14 2021 UTC

 11. roadrunnertwice               416     Sun Feb 28 04:09:21 2021 UTC
 12. pinterface                     18     Sat Jul 11 03:07:04 2020 UTC
 13. alexwlchan                      5     Sun May 26 04:56:47 2019 UTC
 14. allen                          64     Mon Apr 29 17:10:26 2019 UTC
 15. srukle                         13     Wed Dec 19 03:35:50 2018 UTC
 16. darael                         10     Sun Dec 09 01:41:18 2018 UTC
 17. swaldman                       86     Sat Jul 21 04:13:07 2018 UTC
 18. kaberett                     56.5     Sun Jun 17 18:46:15 2018 UTC
 19. chrisboyle                     18     Sun Jun 17 18:11:05 2018 UTC
 20. pauamma                       150     Sat Jan 20 17:42:28 2018 UTC

( The rest of the list... (168 total) )

pauamma

It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.

pauamma

vvrenn

Hello lovely people!

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post and/or inquire about this, so feel free to correct me if I'm straying where I do not belong.

I was wondering, are there any plans for a visual "uplift" (so to speak) with the site's CSS and mobile compatibility?

I have made the decision to leave LiveJournal, but I am admittedly a bit sad that I had to leave that slick-looking interface over there behind. Not bashing at all, I'm vastly more appreciative of DreamWidth and everything it stands for. And I also realize there are way more important issues that must be worked on. Just wanted to see if anything is in the works. TIA!

pauamma

ilyena_sylph

Wait, what, a Code Tour? The last was only ~~last month~~ three months ago. What is happening?!

A lot, actually! Some old hands and some new people have been very busy about making things better! Soon (hopefully) all of this will go live and things will be even better around here!

( bug fixes, code machete, site improvemets and cruft banishing below )

32 total issues resolved
Contributors:

Vivtek,

alansill,

alierak,

chebegeek,

kareila,

momijizukamori,

rahaeli,

zorkian

To the people who actually do the work, if I got anything wrong after all the help, please let me know and I'll edit!

pauamma

kareila

Every once in a while, I run through

chebegeek and

alansill as new contributors! Congratulations and thank you again!

  #  User                      Changes     Latest
  1. mark                        804.5     Tue Nov 22 17:16:58 2022 UTC
  2. kareila                    1579.5     Tue Nov 22 17:08:52 2022 UTC
  3. alierak                      51.5     Tue Nov 22 17:06:04 2022 UTC
  4. alansill                        2     Tue Nov 22 15:47:35 2022 UTC
  5. momijizukamori             332.16     Fri Nov 18 23:38:23 2022 UTC
  6. chebegeek                       3     Wed Oct 26 01:30:42 2022 UTC
  7. rmholsen                        1     Fri Jun 17 19:28:18 2022 UTC
  8. batrachian                     19     Mon Jan 17 19:44:30 2022 UTC
  9. martindemello                   4     Thu Aug 12 04:59:14 2021 UTC
 10. roadrunnertwice               416     Sun Feb 28 04:09:21 2021 UTC

 11. pinterface                     18     Sat Jul 11 03:07:04 2020 UTC
 12. alexwlchan                      5     Sun May 26 04:56:47 2019 UTC
 13. allen                          64     Mon Apr 29 17:10:26 2019 UTC
 14. srukle                         13     Wed Dec 19 03:35:50 2018 UTC
 15. darael                         10     Sun Dec 09 01:41:18 2018 UTC
 16. swaldman                       86     Sat Jul 21 04:13:07 2018 UTC
 17. kaberett                     56.5     Sun Jun 17 18:46:15 2018 UTC
 18. chrisboyle                     18     Sun Jun 17 18:11:05 2018 UTC
 19. pauamma                       150     Sat Jan 20 17:42:28 2018 UTC
 20. hotlevel4                      54     Mon Jan 01 23:33:48 2018 UTC

( The rest of the list... (167 total) )

pauamma

kareila

For those who haven't seen it, I just posted about the new canary server in

dw_beta. Although it's technically a beta feature, I also wanted to mention it here since it's a feature that will be mostly used by developers to test how their code behaves on the live site.

Right now, the people who can deploy to canary are (I believe) the same people who can merge code changes - so me,

mark,

alierak,

momijizukamori. It's not an automatic process, at least not yet; it has to be kicked off by hand, and it doesn't manage everything - any database or text string changes still have to be applied by running the update-db and texttool scripts, and those changes will affect both canary and stable servers, since they both use the main database.

Right now the only way to be notified when a canary deploy happens is to monitor the #commits channel on our Discord server. I'll try to remember to post here if a canary deploy happens that looks like it will take a while to migrate to the stable server. At the moment, canary and stable are identical.

If you have any questions or comments about how the canary impacts our development workflow, please share them here!

If you have any questions or comments about how turning on the canary impacts your use of the site, please share those on the

dw_beta post I linked above.

Cool? Cool.

kareila

Yes, I know we just did one ~~three hours~~ two weeks ago, but all these changes are already live on the site, Skipper! Let's get cracking!

( Read more... )

21 total issues resolved
Contributors:

alierak,

kareila,

momijizukamori,

zorkian

mark

Hi all!

As of today, I've made a few fairly broad changes to the way our repositories are set up. You will need to likely make some changes to your development workflow. But! They should be simple.

First, the changes:

The dw-free repository has been renamed to dreamwidth -- because,
The dw-nonfree repository is no more, it has been merged into the dw-free under the path ext/dw-nonfree/.
Finally, the master branch has been renamed to main.

These two changes mean that no more do we have to track and coordinate changes across two repositories, they can be done atomically in one place. Since we don't really support or test running Dreamwidth on its own (without the branding) this will also allow us to simplify development by ultimately collapsing the code, too.

To update your checkout of Dreamwidth, you will need to do two separate things. First, go to Github and to your existing dw-free repository, go to the settings and:

Rename the repository to dreamwidth
Go to branches and rename the master branch to main

Once that's done, you need to update your local checkout like this:

 cd $LJHOME

 # WARNING: Only do this if you have no code here that you care about!
 rm -rf ext/dw-nonfree

 # Update the repository root (for your "origin" remote, **set your username here**)
 git remote set-url origin git@github.com:YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/dreamwidth.git

 # Update the repository root (for your "upstream" remote, please change as needed)
 git remote set-url upstream git@github.com:dreamwidth/dreamwidth.git

 # Fetch only to get the new main branch
 git fetch

 # Switch over to it
 git checkout main

 # Get rid of local master
 git branch -d master

 # Redirect HEAD
 git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD refs/remotes/origin/main

That's it; you should be good to go now. I'll work on updating the Dreamhack scripts shortly, but wanted to get these instructions out. Please let me know if you have any questions/comments/issues.

azurelunatic

Today we have 26 closed issues, most of which are improvements that were pushed live a few hours back. The 2022-01-01 to 2022-05-07 code tour will also be live now.

Issue 145: Add site scheme name as a body tag class (pull request) (nonfree pull request)
Category: Fun Browser Tricks, Accessibility, User scripts
Patch by:

momijizukamori
Description: This makes it easier for folks who like to modify their browser's display of websites to make site-skinned Dreamwidth pages do interesting and/or accessibility-customized stuff.

Issue 686: Add 'Indexed' style by wiring
Category: Closed but not done, Tidying Extremely Old Issues
Patch by: n/a
Description: This style was withdrawn (maker was still working on it, may have submitted it through another ticket when finished)

Issue 689: Add 'Suit Yourself' style by flamingchemist
Category: Closed but not done, Tidying Extremely Old Issues
Patch by: n/a
Description: Momiji was going through and found that some crucial components to add this just weren't there.

Issue 1856: CSS in Tabula Rasa overrides height attribute in IMG tag
Category: Rendered Obsolete, Tidying Extremely Old Issues
Patch by: n/a
Description: Momiji says: "We've updated the code handling image resizing in entries and comments, so I'm going to close this as any current issues are most likely something exciting and new."

Issue 1890: issues with various site elements on Windows phone
Category: Rendered Obsolete, Seven Years Is Basically Dead in Electronics Years, Tidying Extremely Old Issues
Patch by: n/a
Description: When someone with a Windows phone has a problem with this again, these issues can be revisited.

Allowing Embeds:

chebegeek went on an allow-embed spree! Thank you! Here are some of the results.

Peertube on stopthatimp.net: domain no longer hosting
Allowed: Blogtalk, Podomatic, Streamable, getyarn.io, Smugmug, MSNBC, Reddit

( 8 Embed tickets )

Issue 2711: update Github user profile icon to HTTPS (pull request)
Category: HTTPS everywhere
Patch by:

RMHolsen
Description: The SSL proxy will now do the right thing with Github's little site icon.

Issue 2887: allow <details> and <summary> elements in comments (pull request)
Category: Spoiler handling, HTML5 my beloved, Overenthusiastic HTML cleaner
Patch by:

momijizukamori
Description:

HOLY WOW THIS WORKS IN COMMENTS NOW

The DW/LJ/spoiler cut has been amazing for entries since it came out on LJ, and HTML5 only ~~recently~~ (oh myyyy, HTML5 has been around for how many years???) -- anyway, it caught up, and it's been available to use in entries in addition to the venerable cut. But comments have not been able to use it! (Because the HTML cleaner is extremely suspicious of anything that could possibly used for evil. Because it's better from a security standpoint to disallow first and ask questions later.) And okay so people have found some BALLER ways to hide spoilers in comments and honestly I'm in awe, but this is the way that HTML 5 wants you to do it:
<details>
<summary>Spoiler warning</summary>
Spoiler details go here! Go wild!!!! IT'S LIVE NOW!!!!!!
</details>

This HTML 5 syntax can be used in comments for spoilers, games, sensitive content, or whatever now.

Issue 2902: the password length in the "change email" form needs to be larger
Category: Making things make sense, 72 is bigger than 50
Patch by:

zorkian, possibly dev-on-prod
Description: Dreamwidth allows quite a bit of annoyance to anyone who might want to crack your passwords. (Usually the value to a hacker of any random person's online presence is your good search engine reputation, and they can sell your login to spammers who dearly want search engines to pick up their bad links.) It would also be good to be able to change your stale or potentially compromised password to something of an equally obnoxious length, but prior to the new year's code push, the maximum the form allowed was 50 characters, instead of 72 like it ought to have been. Please look into using a password manager, which will remember unique and random character passwords for all of your logins, in a way that storing them in your brain maybe won't.

Issue 2949: convert /manage/banusers to TT (pull request)
Category: The Great Template Toolkit Conversion, Resisting the urge for a complete rewrite
Patch by:

momijizukamori
Description: Yet another page converted away from Brad's Markup Language. Momiji says: "Part of the ongoing crusade eliminate BML from the codebase! One page down, many more to go..."

mark says: "Woo! Thank you! Every time I review one of these, I have these itches to rewrite the Perl so it's more modern and cleaner... but then I realize that would make this project take 10x as long. Soooo nope. Discretion is the better part of valor or something."

denise says: "Only one endless modernization project that everybody hates at a time, Mark."
It's not that we hate it as such, but sometimes things move or look different and generally that's no fun even when it's attached to necessary fixes.

Issue 2951: Fix send-email working on dreamhacks (pull request)
Category: Developers need love too, A Strongly Worded Letter to Cloudflare
Patch by:

momijizukamori
Description: Momiji says: "When we moved email notifications to AWS, we accidentally broke email sending from DreamHacks, because the AWS mailer uses some options sendmail on the hack box does not. This now checks if those options are set before trying to use them, and skipping them if not."

Issue 2952: Add a link for Discord to contrib docs (pull request)
Category: The Wheel of Time turns, Discord, dev communications
Patch by:

momijizukamori
Description: Momiji says: "We moved to using Discord for dev communication rather than IRC, but this was not linked anywhere helpful in the repo itself. This has now been fixed!"
One of the hard problems in online communication is moderation and platform management. IRC in particular is hard to keep as open to new people looking for a little help with development, while still keeping out the people who would prefer to fill it with rude appendages and worse. It also helps to have a platform that people are comfortable using. And these days the sweet spot seems to be Discord.

Issue 2953: Convert /tools pages to TT (pull request)
Category: The Great Template Toolkit Conversion
Patch by:

momijizukamori
Description: See a BML page, fix a BML page.

Issue 2958: <details>/<summary> tags have no styling in sitescheme
Category: CSS hijinks, HTML5 my beloved
Patch by:

momijizukamori
Description: The little sideways triangle that accompanies a cut tag also accompanies the <details> tag, except the CSS was taking that away on site themed pages. Momiji: "Which is very silly in this case, and once I'm sure it won't make other bits of the site layout go haywire I'm gonna see about fixing that."

Issue 2959: Restore ability to apply user CSS to siteschemes (pull request)
Category: Accessibility, Fun Browser Tricks, Technically it's "site skin" but it was site scheme on LJ soooooo...
Patch by:

momijizukamori
Description: Adds a class to body tags for Tropospherical Red & Purple, on Foundation pages. Or, if you were trying to use a userscript and it was failing on some pages for no good reason, try again?

Issue 2964: Don't override browser display for details and summary (pull request)
Category: #2958, Browser hijinks, HTML5 my beloved
Patch by:

momijizukamori
Description: Momiji says: "The details HTML element is basically a nice little native expand/collapse that allows you to hide and unhide blocks of text. By default, browsers usually style it with a little arrow at the side to indicate that it can be expanded and collapsed. We, however, had some CSS fixes for old browsers (IE and very old versions of Firefox) that didn't support this newer element - which were probably added when those browsers weren't super old and it was actually a good idea - that caused the arrow to vanish entirely for all browsers. Very silly. Now that we are in the future, those workarounds can be removed!"

Issue 2965: Protected foundation (pull request)
Category: The Great De-BML-ening, Foundation
Patch by:

momijizukamori
Description: Momiji says: "More dragging of pages into the 21st century! Note: this does move OpenID login one click away on the page - this choice was made to better match the regular login modal, to make the design more visually balanced, and because the standalone OpenID page has a better explanation of what OpenID is and how to use it."

Issue 2970: Add Beta flag for new inbox redesign (pull request)
Category: Beta Testing, Inbox Update
Patch by:

momijizukamori
Description: Momiji says: "After we accidentally pushed the inbox update live without planning to, and got a bunch of feedback, we realized we uhhhh should probably make it a beta, until we get all the bugs ironed out, as it's a pretty major rewrite of the code."
Here's the

dw_maintenance entry: Switching to hCaptcha + Beta Inbox available
Beta features page

Issue 2978: Tweaks to the new inbox design (pull request)
Category: Beta Testing, Inbox Update
Patch by:

momijizukamori
Description: Round one of tweaks to the new inbox design, based on user feedback!

Unread items are now expanded by default
Fixed bad word-wrapping settings
Added a touch of margin to timestamps so they don't run up right against subject lines
Added the 'unsent' filter view back in.
Add controls back to the bottom of the message list

26 total issues resolved
Contributors:

RMHolsen,

chebegeek,

momijizukamori,

zorkian