The Return of Mobile and Other Site Improvements
Those of you who check the site on a mobile phone will be happy to know the mobile is back. Just go to m.dailykos.com on your phone to try it out. For now the mobile site is view only and shows a...
View ArticleSite Updates
We have two site updates to announce. First is a minor mobile site enhancement- in the list of stories on the frontpage, recent list and recommended list (mobile only) you can now scroll back in...
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Fun-in-the-sun, friday afternoon, random diary test-a-palooza
This is a real sign from a Colorado motel room. I need a place where I can make some nonsensical comments that won't bother anyone else. This is that place. Feel free to join me if you dare. Or not.
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Is the netroots dead? Hardly
Daily Kos traffic hitting records almost daily, the sign of a dying netroots? Did you hear the one about how the dying Newsweek wrote about the supposedly dying netroots? It's pretty funny. You can...
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Daily Kos and Sandy
The Daily Kos servers live in New York City. Any major outages in that city could cause Daily Kos to go down. Our data center has contingencies in place to ride out any such disaster (generators and...
View ArticleDaily Kos-Sandy update
As I've mentioned a few times already, most of our site hardware in in NYC. On Friday, our tech team began preparations for moving our infrastructure out of the city in case Hurricane Sandy took it...
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Sunday Morning Test-o-Rama & Technological Open Thread Of Doom
You can see and ride on the rail car that contains this sign at the Western Railway Museum in Rio Vista, CA. We're going to insert some code now that should give us some better performance on Tuesday....
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The most awesome things about Daily Kos, election season 2012
The official Daily Kos Community Quilt, by Sara R and winglion, hanging at the office. The center piece is from the late Ben Masel's quilt. Having written about the things that annoyed me, now it's...
View ArticleImage uploading now available to everyone!
Last July we launched our kick ass image library:Using the Images Function on Daily Kos from dailykos on Vimeo.This image library allows subscribers to upload images to the site via a drag and drop...
View ArticleCelebrating New Diarists' 1st Year
Please join us in celebrating the 1st Anniversary of the New Diarists group, which unites diarists who want help with more experienced kossacks who are willing to provide it. In "'Buddy System' another...
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HTML Magic for Diarists - Image Mapping with Anchors or Links
NOTE:The anchor portion was working, now it's not...no idea why. So I've adjusted the image to use URLs to hopefully work better...Skill level: Advanced (but learnable by code-friendly novices &...
View ArticleNew Diarists: More Resources for All
As someone recently pointed out, figuring out how to do things at DKos can be confusing and time-consuming, even when one knows where to begin looking for instructions! So this diary updates last...
View ArticleWhat's New In Tech - February, 2013
Its been a while since tech has released new user-facing features. In the run up to the election we bolstered our infrastructure so as to be able to handle the drastically increased election-season...
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The Daily Kos community is in charge, whether I (or you) like it or not
Rarely divulged email list stats proving that it exploded in size when we started picking topics based on community interests. Yesterday Chris wrote about how we engage in activism:Since the beginning...
View ArticleAsk me anything
There were lots of questions in the meta diaries over the last couple of days, and we've tried to answer many of them. Here's another chance to do so.Ask me anything. I'll answer in batches. I'll be...
View ArticleHow would you like an ad-free Daily Kos?
You hate ads. We hate ads. Everyone hates ads.But they are a necessary evil when running a publishing operation. Or at least they were. As I've written before, online ad revenues are collapsing for...
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Ask me anything about Daily Kos
Welcome to this week's edition of "Ask me anything about Daily Kos." As Markos put it when he announced this new, regular feature last week, "you guys learn more about what we're up to, and we learn...
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Ask Me Anything about Daily Kos
Why wasn't my lunch bigger? It's my turn for Ask Me Anything. I'm one of currently four developers working the tech side at Daily Kos. (As it happens, we have an opening for another Ruby on Rails...
View ArticleDRAFT community guidelines, comment period
By popular request, I've drafted a new set of community guidelines with input from Meteor Blades, Navajo, Elfling, and Susan Gardner. These are draft rules. You'll have the next couple of days to hash...
View ArticleNew community guidelines, final draft
Below are final draft rules incorporating feedback I've seen the last week. It's a "final" draft, but of course we can always tweak.Also, before we get into the rules, I saw Bob Johnson's diary about...
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Update from the Tech Dept- March 4th, 2014
Today we are releasing a number of updates for the Image Library. The big news is that we’re now making the shared images in the image library available for everybody’s use. This means anybody can...
View ArticleFirst look at DK5
The dev team is cranking hard to finish the next major revision of this site in time for the fall elections. At some point, we'll have an open beta so people can hunt down bugs and help us refine the...
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Daily Kos August update: crazy record growth (still)
Following crazy record-setting months in June and July (I was on vacation in early August, so I didn't write that up), August has proven that Daily Kos is the place to be during heavy news periods....
View ArticleMeet your new Contributing Editor Class of 2014!
Daily Kos was built on the notion that regular people were just as important in our political discourse as the so-called experts, that pundits didn't have a monopoly on wisdom, that power could be...
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Meet our newest writer, Shaun King
Shaun King Hi all, I'm pleased and happy to announce the newest member of our editorial team: Shaun King. Without knowing who he is, you already placed his first diary at the top of the rec list, and...
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Daily Kos September 2014 update: the (not so) calm before the storm
After August's record-setting month, we got a bit of pullback in the numbers of uniques: September's 7.35 million unique visitors was over a million fewer than August's 8.46 million. And you know what?...
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Welcome New Users, to the Community Spotlight
Welcome, New Users, to Daily Kos, from your host Susan Grigsby. This Diary is intended to help you orient yourself to the site and ask questions about how to use it.Below the orange gnocchi-doodle you...
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Welcome our newest writer, Kerry Eleveld
Kerry Eleveld After years of focusing the bulk of our resources on our technology department, it's been super nice to be able to devote more of our budget to our editorial team. A month or two ago, we...
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Daily Kos end-of-year update, and a peek into 2015
2014 was a shitty year for us politically, but as a community, it was the biggest breakout year since 2003.The chart above is based on traffic data compiled by Quantcast, and you can see their charts...
View ArticleDaily Kos to Take a Nap, Travel Back in Time
Tonight, starting at 9 PM ET / 6 PM PT and running for about 15 hours, we will be taking Daily Kos offline to implement a major upgrade to the infrastructure behind the site. There should be no changes...
View ArticleDid you mail a donation to our PO box that was never deposited?
Thank you so much!However, due to personnel changes here at Daily Kos and poor communication at the post office, we discovered a bin of mail going back months, including lots of checks, that had never...
View ArticleDaily Kos Will be Offline Saturday Morning as We Move Data Centers
On Saturday at 8 AM PT, the tech team will be moving Daily Kos from its current web host to Amazon's Web Services. We'll be taking the site down for an estimated one to three hours while we move our...
View ArticleFarewell, but not exactly goodbye
I am sad, but also excited, to announce that after 11 years I am leaving Daily Kos and joining Raintank, where I will be working on monitoring software and doing devsy-opsy.It's been a long and...
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Help us break Daily Kos 5—before it even ships
Maybe you've heard that Daily Kos was building a new version of the software that powers the site. Maybe you heard and forgot—I understand: It's been a long time coming. But I sincerely believe it...
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Where Are My Steenkin' Badges, Kos?
Part of your profile is a display of badge icons, which seem not to be explained in any organized way in the FAQ or Knowledge Base, or anywhere else that I can find. So here you go, to the extent that...
View ArticleCranky Users DK5 MetaFestival Time!
Cranky Users is organizing a DK 5 MetaFestival to celebrate our community and DK while working on the specific purpose of providing constructive and respectful feedback on DK 5 beta, both features we...
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Beta site update, and yes, YOU are the focus group
(Note: I'm crazy busy right now, so I cranked this off as quickly as I could and am posting without any proofing. So forgive me if it's a little more rough than my usual.)The first major update to the...
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Getting Beta All The Time
Beta now has another series of fixes and enhancements ready for you to check out. It’s an odd grab-bag; please check the list for the full rundown. Thanks for your continued testing- the feedback has...
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On HR's, flags, and a more positive community
We're going for "nice". Those of you playing at the beta site should’ve noticed a big change in the comments—we’ve gotten rid of the HR functionality, including the ability to see who HR’d a comment....
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DK5 to arrive this Saturday
Four years in the making, the newest version of the software that runs this website will be installed this Saturday. This is a wide-ranging upgrade that affects site branding and a number of features,...
View ArticleEarly DK5 conversion thoughts
Hey all! As you’ve seen (to many of your consternations), the big change happened yesterday late evening. Some quick notes:Site speed. Things were laggy overnight and this morning. I felt it, and it...
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DK5 Update, Day 3: Why fix what wasn't broke? Because it was. Broken.
Huzzah! Annoying new-message pop-ups are gone! That one was fortunately easy to kill (at least until the whole feature can be rethought). Others will take longer. We are doing design review of various...
View ArticleDK5 Improvements
If there's one fundamental truth about software, it's that nothing is ever set in stone. Developers are always tweaking, modifying, and re-writing their code, with the never-ending goal of making it...
View ArticleDK5 Update, Day 5: The pause before the pre-Thanksgiving blitz
I’m out sick today, and the devs have a well-deserved four-day weekend to recharge their batteries for the coming dev storm. After putting in more than two weeks without a day off, it probably wasn’t...
View ArticleRelease Notes- 12/3/15
We have been hard at work polishing the site post deploy. This release is a grab bag of fixes. If anything unites the work we chose, its changes that seemed quick but with the potential to have...
View ArticleDK5 update: metrics, priorities, and what's coming soonest
Today I’ll talk about where things currently stand, and where our to-do list stands. First, let’s look at site metrics. There’s traffic. At this time of the year, with Thanksgiving and the Christimas...
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Sorry about that hiccup, but maybe worth it?
A little rocky this morning. There will be an official diary with changes later. Explore and enjoy… check out collapsing sidebars and comments and previewable links in edit mode…
View ArticleSome reminders about outing, sock-puppetry and revealing paid campaign positions
Recent incidents of sock-puppetry, outing and accusations of paid campaign shilling have prompted us to remind long-time users and inform new ones that certain behavior is forbidden at Daily Kos. Those...
View ArticleRelease Notes: Single Comment View Makes a Comeback
Today the single comment view makes its triumphant return. It should look pretty familiar in it’s structure and how it integrates into the rest of the site. Take a look: copy a link to a single comment...
View ArticleAm I the only one with this problem?
I don’t know whether this diary will actually be published, but I’m trying anyway. And even if it does see the light of day on dKos, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to see it.You see, for several...
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