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]

It's not a technical problem for DW, it's a resource problem. If DW is repeatedly asking LJ's servers for the information required for cross site reading lists for every DW user who has it set up, then Dreamwidth is asking for an ungodly amount of data a lot of times every day. LJ would block DW from accessing its servers as a resource hog. [Clarification: how many data requests count as "so many as to block you from our servers" isn't an absolute number, it depends, in part, on what you want to allow outside services to do. Twitter, for example, blocks and unblocks outside webservices and particular clients from accessing its servers pretty regularly, for violating its Terms of Service.]

However, if you, lapillus, ask LJ for this information only about your own specific account, you are asking for much less data, much less often, and LJ is fine with you asking for your own info once every fifteen minutes, or however often you would ask about it.

[lapillus]

I was curious if there is a way for DW to ask, on our behalf as individuals (since it would need our authentication to get at locked entries anyway), or if this was the sort of issue that online RSS readers were also running into with situations like that or not.

[matgb]

One of the problems is security. There is one online feedreader that'll do it that I know of (Gregarious), but that needs to be installed on your own server. But in order to authenticate the feed, it needs your username and password, and to send that in the GET request.

So if, say, Google Reader wanted to authenticate feeds, it would need to store your password, and you'd be giving Google Reader access to all the content you have access to on LJ. The way Greader works is it checks the feed once and stores that info for all readers, whereas authentication would require they check it for each individual reader.