Dreamwidth Open Beta Date Set

[branchandroot]

Dreamwidth's open beta is coming!

The date is set, and on April 30th the site will launch open beta on full production hardware. At that time, the one-time sale of seed accounts (permanent accounts for $200) will begin.

Invite codes for free accounts will be released as the site proves it can handle the load, but anyone who wants an account can also pay $3 for a month of paid time, after which the account may then be let to lapse back to free. Or, you know, keep it paid and get all the frills.

Some major things that are in the pipe for open beta: journal importing, entry crossposting between sites, the watch/access split of the friends list, expanded standardized options for journal styles so that you can pick based on the look you like instead of being limited by the functionality you want, vastly improved maintainer options for communities.

A lot of other functions will not be finished by open beta. There will still be rough edges to be sanded down and anyone who moves over completely at that time can expect a few bobbles. I have to say, though, I've been very impressed by the number and vigor of DW's working programmers, so bobbles should be steadied reasonably quickly.

For those who want to look around the current testing site, you can start from Denise's journal. Check out the comms, look at people's journals to see what the closed beta testers have done while they kick the tires. Sign in with OpenID, if you want, and you will have a stripped down (non-posting) account to poke around with.

(And if you don't like pink, well, I submitted three alternate site schemes today, and you can see the screenshots here: Celerity, Blueshift, Gradation.)

Dreamwidth promises to be a very cool thing, and a project committed to Open Source. The improvements Dreamwidth is making are available to everyone to use, including LiveJournal. In addition to simplifying the installation of the software, plans include the ability to port LJ-based databases into the Dreamwidth system, so that LJ-based sites can easily switch over if they wish. No restrictions, no fee, no hook (and no more mind-bendingly complicated and undocumented code). And we're going to have drafts and real hierarchical tagging and memories that work and exporting to pdf in whole or by time-span or tag and and and... *waves hands* cool stuff!

I'm enthused. You can tell.

Take a look around. The testing site and all the improvements you can read about in dw_news and the other comms have been accomplished in nine months. Just nine. In people's spare time, because almost everyone working on this has a day job too. And this? Is just the beginning.

Comments

[annotated_em.insanejournal.com]

*glees* This is splendid news.

[branchandroot]

Isn't it? This is going to be so cool.

[watersword.insanejournal.com]

I know! So awesome!

I actually wandered over here to ask prettily if you would walk me through creating a site scheme; I am a fair hand with CSS, but am at a bit of a loss as to how to start. :)

[branchandroot]

I totally sympathize. Lessee.

The easiest thing to do is to download a page from the site to look at and tinker with on your home computer. That will give you an idea of the elements you're working with. Most of it is actually really simple! Try downloading the home page to start with.

Make sure you download just the html source, and then go and download a copy of http://s.dreamwidth.org/stc/tropo/red.css. That's the default style sheet. Ignore it for now, though.

First, just delete red.css from the list in the style sheet links (this is important, otherwise you'll be mixing up two site styles) and see if you can make the page look the way you want it to by adding a link to your own style sheet. This should involve body, #canvas, #page, #menu, #account-links, #header-search, #footer and #masthead. Pretty simple. If you need to change the html to make the menus behave the way you need, go ahead, but be sure to keep those links in there somewhere.

Once you have the page looking the way you want, look at red.css. Replace the first part of it with your own code. Then you get to change the colors of the next three quarters, which controls how all the options and settings pages look. Don't worry about the spacing of anything, that can be left as is. All you need to do is change the colors to match your scheme.

Lo, you have a site scheme!

The only real catch is that reset.css strips out all the formatting, like list styles and indents, paragraph margins, header sizes, the lot of it. So you'll probably want to redefine those.

[watersword.insanejournal.com]

Thank you kindly!

[midorigirl.insanejournal.com]

While I normally take the time to read the FAQs and explore/poke/other wise investigate myself, I admit I won't have time until Tuesday to do a proper investigation...so, that being said can you give me a brief synopsis of what makes DW that much better than, say, IJ which has done a pretty good job in terms of transparency and limiting censorship?

[branchandroot]

Sure thing. The differences I see revolve around development.

For one, Dreamwidth has attracted the cream of the programmers and designers who worked on LJ (until they were fired or quit, an unfortunate number of them). This means that they're very familiar with the code base and how it needs to be fixed for a successful fork. There are also kind of a lot of them. Squeaky is a wonderful guy, but there's only one of him and he has a day job. So he doesn't have time to keep the site up and also do development on it.

DW is going to have a lot of features that no LJ-clone site will have, and I really like that. Really a whole lot, because I've wanted a lot of them for a long time.

I also really like the culture that's developing among the people who are working on it. I like that Denise has done her research and figured out how to run the site sustainably without adds. I like that there's a spirit of "do it ourselves" improvement.

I think transparency and lack of censorship will be fairly equivalent between DW and IJ, though DW has built more safeguards into their business charter to ensure continuity of those things. I like that forethought.

But I think the biggest difference really is that DW is a fork, a new direction that builds on the inherited code.

[dancing_serpent.insanejournal.com]

I'm getting more and more excited about DW the more I read about it. Even though I'm kind of slow and still don't really get what "granted access" means in that case. *ducks*

Will the seed account really be limited in numbers?

[branchandroot]

*grins* This should be totally cool.

If you give someone access, that means that person can read your locked posts. If you subscribe to someone, that means they show up on your reading list. In order for their locked posts to show up, they have to grant you access. It takes a little getting used to, but it's so much more controllable.

[dancing_serpent.insanejournal.com]

Thank you for the explanation. I think I'm going to like that. That way you can grant people access to locked posts but don't have to subscribe to their journals if you don't want to. *g*

[rahaeli.livejournal.com (from insanejournal.com)]

*wanders by*

Yes, Seed (permanent) accounts will be limited in number; we're only selling 400 of them, and they're selling for $200 USD each.

The reason we're limiting the number is a little complex -- see http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Dreamwidth.org:_Business_FAQs for the extended explanation, but basically, selling permanent accounts privileges revenue now at the cost of revenue later, and since we're designing for long-term sustainability, we don't want to rely on them too much. On the other hand, we want to make sure that we have the first year's operating expenses in hand right up front, because that way we can concentrate more on building a kickass service and less on "can we afford to keep the lights on this week?"

So the limited number is a compromise: we decided what it would likely cost us to run the service for the first year, set our prices, and decided we would sell that many Seed accounts (seed = like seed funding), as the equivalent of our IPO. (Only without having to take money from vulture I mean venture capitalists.) That way, any income over & above that in our first year can go to the goal of getting us out of dedicated hosting and on to colocation, as well as paying us a living wage, allowing us to hire people to hack on the codebase with us, and allowing us to set out specific contracting bounties ("we'll pay $10k for this particular extensive and exhaustive massive major project").

We also don't want to oversell permanent accounts because we know a lot of people on LJ feel like once they buy a permanent account, their voices don't matter/aren't heard, because their only power is to stop paying. We don't want to ever, ever, ever make people feel like that, so we're limiting the number we sell. Premium paid accounts ($50/year as opposed to the basic paid price of $35 a year, both of which get $10 discounts yearly for the first six months of operation) get the exact same features, at the same levels, that Seed accounts do, so people who want to try us out and see if we'll be a good fit for them can have access to all the same features/levels that Seed accounts do.

[dancing_serpent.insanejournal.com]

Thank you for the information. Yeah, that makes sense to me now. DW sounds awesome already, and the way you and Branch talk about it gets me even more excited.

[jyuukoi.insanejournal.com]

Thank you so much for the information. I really can't wait until this starts up, and the information is intriquing me more and more.

[nanthimus.insanejournal.com]

Ooooh my God I'm getting so excited. <333

[branchandroot]

*sparkles* Oh /yeah/.

[jyuukoi.insanejournal.com]

This is certainly starting to intrique me more then a little bit. >.>

[branchandroot]

*grins* It's the Batman of journal sites. There will be marvelous toys. The journal importer (brings comments, tags, your flist, the works) and the built-in crossposter will be online for open beta and I can't wait.