Dreamwidth Q&A Session

[denise]

I realized this morning that it has been quite some time, so I figured it would be a good time for another Dreamwidth Q&A session!

Got a question on how the business end of DW works? Curious about the progress on a particular feature? (Although I can probably answer that for you by saying: we're working on paying down our technical debt so that we can move forward on a lot of the planned features; it got to the point where we couldn't progress further without making some aggressive modernization of the existing codebase.) Wondering what an average day in the life of a DW employee is? Got that one question that you've been vaguely wondering about for ages, but never felt like it was "important" enough to make a support request to get the answer on? Want to know if it really is that cool being able to work from home without wearing any pants? (Answer: yes, especially when it's 85 degrees F in my office and the air conditioners won't be delivered and installed for at least another day or two.)

Comment here, and we will answer!

(Just a reminder: you may receive comments or replies from people who know the answer to your question, but aren't officially DW staff. If the person who answers you doesn't have the official "staff" userhead -- -- they are not DW staff. They may be correct -- if they aren't, I will be sure to answer and clear up any misconceptions -- but they are not speaking ex cathedra Dreamwidth, so to speak!)

No question too big, no question too small. There's also previous Q&A sessions and the Business FAQs to browse through!

(Answers may be a bit slow depending on computer woes and additional stuff going on, but we will answer!)

Comments

[zvi]

Status updates requested:

Virtual gifts?
Multimedia hosting?
Update page/drafts?

Is the percentage of paid users on track for sustainability?

[denise]

Vgifts -- most of the backend code is written, and the frontend and admin stuff is about half there, I think? The coder who's working on it has had an explosion of Life lately, but she hopes to get back to it soon, from what I've heard.

Hosting -- mark had a barebones version (for "email in the picture from your phone or from an email post"); the backend is done, it just needs a frontend and user-facing admin stuff (managing photos, deleting photos, etc). fu has the code, and will be working on it. We just have to be careful because implementing it will have to mean watching our bandwidth and disk space carefully.

Update page -- a lot of the JQuery stuff we've been doing (available by turning on beta testing for your account, etc) is to allow that project to be completed. I think fu has the update page nearly entirely coded now, but can't deploy it until a bunch of backend stuff gets finished.

I have been very, very, very pleased with the paid user percentage over the past year or so. If it hadn't been for the three months of no-payments, we would've finished 2010 in the black. We're going to finish 2011 in the black, due to the seed account sale, but obviously that's not something to count on; I'm not sure what the percentages are going to look like in another six months (what with the seed accounts no longer bringing in annual revenue, etc) but I'm honestly not concerned, since our usage and paid account percentage has been so good. I'm really pleased.

[zvi]

I wish coding was one of those things I liked better, so I could work on some of this front end stuff.

[denise]

If you like to do HTML mockups, or even just sketches and wireframes, we always need that too!

[zvi]

I'm better at critiquing other people's mockups than making my own. I tend towards fuzziness and fiddly bits in design. But if somebody is at the stage where they want someone to look things over, I'd be happy to.