forthwritten

Meeting with supervisor today. I now feel a bit less confused about what I should be doing and a lot more guilty for not having done any corpus cleanup. Rather frustratingly, WS5 appears to have broken on my computer (shortcuts don't work, trying to open the .exe from c:\program files\wsmith5 doesn't work, opening Ctrl+R and trying to run it from there doesn't work) and MonoConc refused to recognise my .txt files as .txt files so I think I'll be working in the grad room tomorrow.
Found out that, as I'm volunteering as a helper at a conference, I don't have to pay the £300 fees. While working 8-6 is going to be hard work, not having to pay is pretty good. We also get fed and, if the last conference was anything to go by, supplied with truly impressive amounts of coffee.

Have more or less finished writing my FAQs - I could probably fiddle around with these forever but I'm handing them to the copy editing team for a fresh pair of eyes. Some of them aren't as extensive as LJ FAQs, but the whole point is that FAQs are for quick reference. I don't think a guide to HTML should be in FAQs, for example. Instead, Dreamwidth is going to include more extensive information in knowledge bases and have guides for more general questions to supplement the FAQs.
At the moment I'm mostly editing for visuospatial language, although I wrote the FAQs for dating out of order and polls this week. I find it interesting that I asked to change link text today, whereas I'm not sure if I would have noticed this was a problem even a few weeks ago.

I don't want to be a DW bore (I have sometimes been procrastinating on icerocket and even the posts by advocates are annoying when they're wrong or misleading) but I like the concrete things they think of to improve the site. I like that alternative site schemes were prioritised because the red username links in the default site scheme have different, distressing connotations in other cultures. I like that, when someone pointed out that the diversity statement could be read as excluding transpeople, one of the site owners responded in a non-confrontational way and it's being rewritten to explicitly welcome transpeople using their preferred terminology. I love what the accessibility team are doing.
I'm not fannish, I find it frustrating that Dreamwidth has been seized on as a fannish project when it's not, I find the hype and bitterness over invite codes hard to understand (people, it's in closed beta, this is the equivalent to sawdust everywhere and people in overalls banging on things and a crackly radio playing chart hits somewhere), and I think that level of hype is dangerous because it creates unrealistic expectations and with that, disappointment. Of course it's not going to shit glitter and rainbows and world peace. But I, personally, am glad that I've given it my time and contributed towards it.