Drive By Cool Reporting

[zvi]

If you don't personally know a cool hunter to talk to about making Dreamwidth better, you can leave a comment here. The cool hunters are interested in:

• Ways you use Dreamwidth that the site wasn't really designed for
• Ways Dreamwidth makes it difficult or tedious to do things you want to do
• Tools you use from outside of Dreamwidth to make things happen on Dreamwidth
• Tools your friends are using on other blogging sites, personal publishing sites, electronic diaries, etc. that you wish we had on Dreamwidth

You don't have to tell cool hunters things, of course. If you have a clear idea of how to make DW better, you're probably better off telling dw_suggestions. But if all you know is that "It's too hard to do X," comment here to tell a cool hunter. We're here to serve as a cool to developer translation service.

Please put a subject on your comment! This makes it much easier for me to properly corral the reports in gmail.

Comments

spoiler tag

[afuna]

I wish we had a spoiler tag, which would white out the background and the foreground, but let you highlight or click or something to reveal.

Hmmm, it wouldn't work for people with screenreaders, but there may be ways to tell any tools to skip it?

Re: spoiler tag

[zvi]

I'm replying to you because that way the info will be properly correlated for my next round up. I ... should have thought to add this one before.

http://amadi.dreamwidth.org/40143.html#cutid1

Refine: incorporates a skip anchor so screenreaders can avoid the spoiler.

Warning: (<a title="Skip this Warning" href="#skip">skip</a>) <span title="This is a warning that is also a spoiler. Highlight to read." style="color:#666;background-color:#666;">Warning text goes here.</span> <a name="skip"></a>Summary:

Re: spoiler tag

[afuna]

Oh, nice! That is an awesome implementation.

Re: spoiler tag

[afuna]

One additional refinement: we may be able to use JS as an additional way to reveal (a tiny "click to reveal" icon or link?). There seem to be accessibility implications with having to click and drag, or it may just be difficult for people on some systems.

The only issue I can think of now are sighted people using text-based browsers; and the only way around that is to store the text somewhere else, which... would interfere with interfaces which can't use JS.

change color of text in Tropospherical Red scheme

[runpunkrun]

I'm so glad this comm is here, I was wondering where to bring this up.

I use the Tropospherical Red scheme to view entry pages, and I like almost everything about it except the color of the text -- it's light grey and kind of ridiculous, especially for long posts.

I ninja'd together a bookmarklet to make the text black, but it's a mess; I appropriated it from another source and it's way more complicated than it needs to be. What I'd like is for the text in Tropospherical Red to be changed sitewide to black or even dark grey, or to have a script for Stylish and/or Greasemonkey that automatically changes the color when the pages load. It'd really save my eyes.

Re: change color of text in Tropospherical Red scheme

[zvi]

Something like the site scheme is more of a feedback issue, actually. You should submit a support request to the Feedback category or send an e-mail to feedback@dreamwidth.org .

As I recall (but don't quote me on this) at least one high contrast horizontal site scheme was supposed to be in the works, but there was also some question as to how many different site schemes the site is going to support. (Giving more choices actually starts to impede usability, so it's a bad idea to let everyone simply reconfigure the site to their own tastes.)

At the moment, Lynx is a black on white scheme, and you might want to check out Celerity, which has dark brown text on an off-white background.

Re: spoiler tag

[zvi]

Also, black/black is better than white/white or grey/grey, because Macs process it better.

Re: change color of text in Tropospherical Red scheme

[runpunkrun]

I was just hoping someone could whip up a script so I could change the font color on my end, that way it wouldn't be a usability issue. Is there somewhere else to ask for that?

In the meantime, I'll email feedback.

Re: change color of text in Tropospherical Red scheme

[zvi]

You could ask at getting_started maybe? I don't know if there's a greasemonkey or stylish comm.

[melina]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I use the LJ Firefox plugin, and it does several things I've become so accustomed to that when I'm on DW rather than LJ, I miss them sort of desperately.

The two most important to me are that you can right-click on any cut tag and it will bring up a context menu from which you can load the cut portion into a box, without reloading the page.

It can do the same with comments, so that you can either read a comment or add a reply without leaving your reading page or opening a new window. This doesn't work well for a huge post with 200 comments, but for a post with 10 or 20, it works great and makes reading much faster.

It has some other cool features, like opening all cross-links in light or your style as you prefer, but the ones I really miss are the ability to open cuts and comments in the current page without reloading. I would love to either see the LJ firefox plugin cloned/modded to work with DW, or these kinds of features added to DW itself.

(I'm sorry if this isn't the right place. Please delete if this isn't appropriate. Thanks.)

[zvi]

This is the right place for that sort of request. We're already considering the plugin and its features, for incorporation, but they're not currently on the development plan.

If you want the plugin cloned/modded to work with DW, your best bet is to contact the plugin writer and ask them whether they want to dual support. Dreamwidth isn't building software to use with the site, but it is working hard to document the software that runs the site, so outside software writers can do cool stuff to the site.

[melina]

Someone tried that, but the developer said no.

If other coders could consider these features, either as an add-on or for DW itself, it would be really awesome.

[par_avion]

I recently posted a poll for opt-in filters, and man, managing filters is a PITA. That's why I never use them.

Wouldn't it be cool if there was a special kind of poll that could manage opt-in and opt-out filters?

I think that LJ's original design was all about letting the journal owner control who was on what filter, but LJ users evolved the idea of opt-in / opt-out filters. Who wants to hear about my kid? Who doesn't want to hear about my garden?

*poof* Magic happens. (This may be completely impossible, but it meets my deefn of cool.)

I currently have poll-vote notifications turned on so that I can track who votes, and add them, but man, this is slow-going!

Third Account Type Option

[curi_o]

Communities aren't optimized to function as personal archives for writing, graphics, etc., and personal journals cannot have "child" personal journals. I suggest implementing a third username option that is optimized for archiving a single user (or a limited number of users') work in a way that sets them apart from mass-user communities. After all, an archive or art blog really isn't a community; it's a little misleading. Some features of communities are good for personal archives, as are some features of personal journals. It's a matter of finding a balance, but creating this option would be something that would definitely make me a firm DW convert.

[grey_bard]

Okay, this sounds... a little odd, and I'm not sure how to request it or if this is a place to do it but...

Would there be some way to make linked journals? That is, to have the owner of said journals somehow (voluntarily) network together their various journals for different (but not hidden from each other) uses? Like a pull down menu or something so you could go from, say, Bob's Garden Blog to Bob's Food Blog to Bob's Fiction Blog in such a way that makes it coherent that it is all the same Bob. And if you wanted to, you could get, say, a master RSS link to All Of Bob if you wanted, to get all of Bob if you wanted to read all of his linked blogs in one convenient option. (Though of course you could still get just the Garden Blog or whatever as individual RSS if you wanted an individual one)

The reason? Some people are always starting a bunch of different separate purpose journals, which they voluntarily and publically link together, but which might be hard for a casual reader to keep track of.

[zvi]

Hmmm. There's been a plan to make hub/spoke journals since before closed beta, where my journal zvi could control my fiction posting journal and my legal name journal and well, everything you listed above. Your proposal sounds sort of like the flipside of that, for those people who have chosen to make the linkages public (which is optional.)

Disabling/Modifying the Types of Alerts Sent When Crossposting

[ex_pseudonym472]

I'm not sure how to properly turn this into a suggestion for dw_suggestions, mostly because I am not entirely sure that this isn't already possible and I'm just too blind to see it.

Right now when you crosspost, you get an alert in your inbox telling you that you successfully crossposted an entry. I'd like to have the option of turning this off. I don't need a success message sent to my inbox. I'd like a fail alert though, one that would not just go to my inbox, but also go to my email. It isn't important for me to know when everything goes according to plan, but it would be REALLY important to me to know when something failed.

As far as I can tell, there aren't settings to manage the creation of these alerts.