The news just keeps coming, and there’s barely a moment to breathe sometimes. Except for tech news, which has been oddly quiet. Maybe we couldn’t get a word in edgewise, maybe we have been heads-down on some other things ahead, but rest assured we at Daily Kos Tech have been hard at work ensuring that all our hamsters are turning the wheels in the same direction, keeping those servers ejecting 1’s and 0’s at the appropriate rate and number.
Today’s news is about badges!
There is an interesting mix of culture at Daily Kos to both secretly love badges while also having some disdain for them. This isn’t a game, except when it is, and why isn’t there a badge for Posted Over 100 Self-Created Cute Animal Images? Because in truth, making games out of things is very Human. Why not have a little fun while putting your all into saving the world?
Anyway, our former badges date their design to 2009 or so, and didn’t have a style that unifies with our newer branding. Some of them weren’t even orange, and what is up with that? It’s one of those things that’s always #15 on the to-do list and so never gets done, unless there’s some particular reason.
Finally, a reason came up: the 20th anniversary and the Koscars. We wanted to acknowledge the writers and contributors who were honored by the community with something more permanent than a single award story. Making new icons for that made the need to update the rest painfully apparent, so here we are!
You’ll see them on the new versions of the user pages.
You’re probably also ready for some other updates. The next obvious question is, why isn’t the miniprofile back yet?
We haven’t forgotten, I promise. It wasn’t just a matter of reverting the code, though. The issue is that the original implementation required a library that we desperately want out of our codebase, and so it has to be rewritten in the new one. It’s still coming.
REALLY? WHAT ARE YOU DOING INSTEAD?
We’re working on bringing mobile users to a more complete Daily Kos experience. Our current mobile version is a very simplified edition of Daily Kos. It doesn’t expand embeds, and it has a very limited comment editor. It’s also pretty long in the tooth, inconsistent with our current look and feel, and difficult to maintain.
Soon, we’ll be announcing a beta test of this new version. It’s really nice. If you squint and are willing to twist your phone a few times, you can even upload images into comments (that will need improvement). Mobile users will be viewing comments drawn with the same code as desktop users, and able to access all of the same functions. I’ve been secretly using it for a while and I like it enough that I will go to some trouble to switch to that version on each story. That’s my threshold for the prospect that it might be ready for y’all to try it with all your devices and see how it turns out.
Follow the Daily Kos Announcements group and watch your My Activity Stream page from the upper right menu if you want to be sure not to miss it. Helpful people who come and play can get even get a badge, if they want. :-)