Cimorene

Oh no

2024-01-22T08:09:16Z

Was reading some Hugos controversy (...) and I kept seeing Bluesky mentioned a lot, so I finally looked it up on Wikipedia. And oh no, that looks like a terrible idea... the same people who were behind Twitter enshittification?!

I saw someone say they were so tired of social platforms funded by venture capital, and I really feel that, but the alternatives seem to be DW and mastodon. I guess I need to investigate the latter again, which I've been meaning to get around to for at least a couple of years now.

It feels like using DW for everything might be nicer, but then I definitely do understand the benefit of having a shorter form alternative.

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I've discovered that I prefer Dreamwidth

2023-11-26T14:51:18Z

After a while of using the desktop less and the laptops and phone more, I've started to use Tumblr much less (Tumblr Mobile is awful), and I find Dreamwidth more pleasant and more interesting now.

Dreamwidth doesn't have nearly the volume of content (well, unless I look at the Network, but that is almost bewilderingly large) and it has few images, so it doesn't give you the dopamine hit that more modern social media sites were engineered to create for the purposes of addiction so they could sell ad space. Reloading Tumblr or Twitter will almost always give something new that catches your eye if you're having that restless, bored ADHD-brained feeling, but it's not as pleasant or as interesting. I am more engaged by my Dreamwidth circle that lets me actually keep up with the lives of the people I follow (well, to varying degrees), and the more writerly post style.

I do miss images though! I'm really grateful to the people I follow who post pictures regularly, and I always mean to post more of them, but I rarely get around to it. Here's a few though:

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On Today's Updates from the CSS Vortex

2023-07-01T22:30:47Z

Success! I got the navigation module into the header of my journal style and got it looking the way I wanted on mobile too. Just as I was doing it, Dreamwidth did a code push that standardized the availability of the option to put navigation in headers for the remaining styles.

I'm still using Practicality - or rather, I'm using a hacked-and-modded fork of Practicality, because there are some overrides you can only do with a layout layer - and Practicality already contained this option, although I wasn't using it before and its default appearance wasn't what I wanted anyway. Even though I knew what I wanted to do more or less, I went through all the Dreamwidth styles and checked their appearance on mobile for ideas first (hopeful of getting a nice bit of code I could borrow, but no such luck), so I know that all of the ones which do let you put more stuff in the header condense a bit awkwardly and take unnecessary space on mobile; that's why I had all that stuff out of the header before, because it was the only easy way to make the header less unwieldy. The control strip at the top already takes a ton of space on the screen. (Trying to style that smaller is my next goal. I've seen custom user-created styles which put the control strip on autohide, behind a button, but the button didn't work both ways on mobile, ie you couldn't tap to hide it again.)

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Projects and time vortices

2023-06-30T11:56:59Z

Today is the last day Wax has to work before her vacation (the first of two shorter ones) starts as well. It's been a pretty long week waiting for that. We have several projects we want to start right away and I'm really excited about stripping and painting our front door.

I got a bee in my bonnet about modifying my dreamwidth layout, which I frequently use from my phone, and digging into css always puts me in a time-devouring vortex. I have made some progress, but I'm starting to think I took the wrong approach and I may need to start over.

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Night Mode: phones, websites, (my blog)

2019-01-22T17:59:06Z

When I was first introduced to the concept of Night Mode a few years ago, my phone had an experimental? Android system feature: a Night Mode toggle in the top toggle bar which would basically invert the values of everything on the screen, with some tweaking. It didn't do a pure inversion like you'd get from Photoshop, but tried to make things more legible and closer to their originals, so a white page background would turn to black, but dark reds like in the Dreamwidth logo became light reds.

This was really useful for reading at night, and when I switched to a OnePlus and found it it doesn't have that toggle, and I couldn't find one to download that would do anything similar, I was extremely disappointed. Ebook readers do it, and I've selected a dark site skin on AO3 to accomodate mostly visiting it at night even if it is just to download things (and the dark skin doesn't bother me on the desktop or during the day). ( Read more... )

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Signal Boost: Also: random thoughts about Tumblr

2019-01-16T16:31:42Z

cesperanza posted: Also: random thoughts about Tumblr

What I miss about Tumblr - and what really worked for me at this stage of my life, and why I still go there - was that I felt that it let me send up a little flag a couple times a day: hi, I'm here! Not dead! Busy but thinking about you guys and Bucky and Steve in between washing the dishes and grading this here homework! . But I could do it by reblogging something fandom-relevant.

#relatable

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Signal Boost: SignalBoost bookmarklet

2019-01-16T15:55:37Z

astolat posted: SignalBoost bookmarklet

Okay, here is the little bookmarklet -- it's pretty limited, but it serves my own laziness, so I share it FWIW and if anyone has the time and wants to upgrade it, go for it and drop me a comment and I'll (ha ha) signal boost any new versions!

I used the bookmarklet to generate the above link, so it's also a preview of what it does: Prints the OP's username, makes the post's title into a bold link, and then puts anything you've highlighted into a blockquote underneath.

☕

This is essentially - in visual form and [clipped quotation+link+OP id] content - what the Tumblr-refugee poster was aiming to do that caused a mild miscommunication and some disagreements (in the links I posted the other day).

That short series of misunderstandings topically highlights an obvious caveat about signal-boosting (or SignalBoosting - using the bookmarklet, that is. SBing?): private content shouldn't be shared, and some people wouldn't like their posts being quoted without permission regardless of content/security. But honestly, the practice (of posting links with summary blurbs) and these questions aren't really new to dreamwidth anyway; this is just a useful little tool to streamline the process of signal boosting posts from elsewhere on the site (and it has much more in common with a Link Post on Tumblr than a reblog).

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discussions about fandom, fannish communities, and differences between dw and tumblr (and lj)

2019-01-13T20:55:19Z

fandom meta discussions on mastodon by tozka (crossposts from their mastodon evidently). A lot of discussion happening in the comments on the decline of community activity on dw, the nature of dw communities, and tumblr culture vs dw culture (and older eras of fandom culture) mores.

Reblogs, redux by potofsoup is in response to a post on the community for new DW-user refugees for Tumblr in which dendriteblues taught non-html-knowing people how to use html tables to fake reblogs within their DW posts (that is, to create indents, basically), which apparently got controversial because the original post has a bunch of frozen comments. I mean, it's obvious to me both why people would want to do this and why people would be upset about it - ymmv (although why THAT particular html??? TABLES OH GOD NO!!) - so what interests me more is potofsoup's attempt to dissect the issue and offer alternatives. In particular, I'm still reeling a bit in bemusement that she's actually explaining the entire notion of threaded comments and what they are.

The above post, in turn, sparked muccamuk's Tumblr Meets DW, which gained a chuckle of sympathy from me wrt the html code and then got heated (and then cooled down, as evidenced by a series of ETAs).

And THAT post caused potofsoup to make a longer post to clarify, essentially, what reblogging on Tumblr is and how it works. She explains (for the benefit of non-Tumblrites who were getting twitchy about other people wanting to copy-paste their content without permission) that it's not the same as reposting and that the motivation is signal-boosting, encouragement, or continuing the conversation. On the other hand, she also clings to using the term "reblog" to signify whatever form of link-posting (or signal-boosting) she intends to use on DW to take the place of the Tumblr reblog. And that is no doubt why I already saw a post on my reading list of confusion about the distinction between reblog/repost and it linked back to that post as context.

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dreamwidth mobile-friendly stylifier

2018-12-28T21:08:44Z

I found this link to solarbird's

Mobile-Friendly Dreamwidth Theme Overlay

sometime last week but I didn't have time to install it until I finished all my Xmas-related crafting and then read most of Yuletide.

Styles on Dreamwidth vary - some display relatively well on mobile and some don't, depending how they deal with wrapping, overflows, scaling, etc. The site pages like the FAQs, Customization pages and icon/image uploading pages have a native style with a navigation bar across the top that doesn't scale down for mobile by default.

So Solarbird's code is designed to work together with the site style Practicality in the silver/gray theme Neutral Good. You install those (or someone said Neutral Evil also works - a dark charcoal variant - but it looked a bit odd to me; maybe that was my monitor) and then paste their custom code into the custom code box, and then when you've gone through the Customize Journal Style page and the Account Settings Display tab and selected to display everything you possibly can in your journal style rather than site style or other people's styles...

... everything is pretty mobile friendly! Journal and Reading/Network pages, individual entry pages, comments (previously my biggest issue), the navigation bar.

This style doesn't actually have the colors hard coded into it, so it will respect the custom colors you pick out in the Customize Journal Style page, according to solarbird, but it still is one single style, of course, which is a potential drawback. I decided I was basically okay with it, after a bit of color and font tweaking, although I have been struggling to remove all the small caps (you'd think find and replace would work but it didn't: I'll have to comb more carefully through the parent layers again and do some testing perhaps).

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images on dw

2018-12-09T16:48:39Z

Google Photos has a lot of free image storage, but can't easily be used to host embedded images. However, I just found this tool, "How to Embed Google Photos into Your Website", which points you to a web app - that is, a website/bookmarklet that lets you input a Google Photos 'share' link and outputs a url for a full-sized embed. The link also covers modifying the url to resize the photo, which Google Photos also supports.

(We've got plenty of hosting space that I could use actually, but it's been so long since I uploaded anything there, since the advent of AO3 and all that, that I haven't even used ftp in years and I'm not sure I'd remember where to find my passwords. Because of the ease of getting images from the phone and desktop online, I've been using Tumblr to host anything I needed to embed here for years.)

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new beginnings stock-taking & introduction + what i'm watching/reading/thinking/caring about

2018-12-07T14:31:36Z

Hello, new people and fellow rediscoverers of DW!

In light of Tumblr Exodus I thought I would point to the bio in my profile and the blanket permission statement there (though in short: comments from new people are welcome; feel free to follow me; feel free to introduce yourself if we don't know one another; almost nothing is access-locked). For anyone newly subscribing to this blog, you may be interested in the introduction post 10 Things I Assume You Know About Me If You Read My Journal (this was a meme that went around LJ in 2006. I've just had it pinned to my profile & periodically updated)(though in short: I'm 36 and have been in fandom since 2001; waxjism is my wife).

I have been using Tumblr more than DW over the past few years, and am now making an active effort to increase my engagement here. (I need to look for more communities, I suppose.) I used to do 'what am I reading and what am I watching' sort of roundups here, and I haven't done one in ages; therefore, here's a hopefully comprehensive ( Survey of My Fannish and Non-Fandom Interests and Hobbies )

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worried personal stream of consciousness about tumblr implosion

2018-12-04T11:41:56Z

In theory, once the review process works, a ban that covers only (a) depictions of sex acts and (b) photographic and photorealistic depictions of genitals and nipples (…) would become merely a stupid inconvenience in terms of my fannish activities, and overall most of what fannish people use Tumblr for, aside from all the fanartists who will remain screwed. BUT ( Read more... )

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fannish platforms: Tumblr goes (visually) PG

2018-12-03T18:28:06Z

A new Tumblr announcement just banned photographic NSFW of genitals, sex acts, and "female-presenting nipples" (this is not a joke), so I think the speed of implosion is escalating. (See Gavia's explosive article at The Daily Dot.)

There's a lot of panicked misunderstanding at this point from people with the erroneous idea that all adult content is banned. Since the announcement explicitly says that text-based and sculptures, drawings, etc are still acceptable, this leaves most fanwork activities (with the exception, of course, of certain scenes in plenty of canons...) intact. So probably everyone doesn't need to leave yet, and probably once word goes around about what it actually says and the dust settles, they won't.

Edit: No, sorry, that's wrong, even artistic illustrations depicting sex acts aren't allowed now. It's non-sex-act nudity (that is, nipples and genitals) that can be depicted but not photographed. And actually that does disallow a huge range of fanart, not to mention fine art, so... ???

On the other hand, this is hardly a good sign, especially if we compare it to the trajectory of livejournal or ff.net.

My last post on the decentralized net wasn't meant as a suggestion that people go out and create rotonde, fritter, or scuttlebutt accounts to serve as actual network backups, more... this is there now and we can expect more stuff to come into existence, with fans building some of it, and some of you may or may not be involved in the construction of that. I am not a programmer, but I'm guessing we are pretty far out from anybody actually having a new solution up and running.

We have plenty of places where fannish people can make accounts, but nowhere else where fannish people can make image-, video, and multimedia posts in an easy visual interface and share them with friendslists. And reblog stuff. Or have nice threaded comment discussions with plenty of tools for the OP (that's DW, not Tumblr, obviously, but we all live in hope).

In the meantime, I hope the traffic of people downloading backups of their Tumblrs doesn't get too heavy. "Export your blog" is an option at the bottom of the page after you open Settings and select your blog from the sidebar, by the way.

The announcement (note misunderstandings and panic ballooning in the comments).

The new community guidelines.

Tumblr's Adult Content policy.

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the next fannish platform migration discussion: what’s out there

2018-12-01T13:12:41Z

At the end of a Very Long Post about the coming EU legislation, Article 13, limblogs posited that fandom is going to have to build our next platform ourselves. She encouraged programmers and coders to jump in and posted a few links and followed up in a more posts. (On the topic of the next fannish platform migration, I recommend following limblogs if you’re curious/tech savvy, or cesperanza perhaps if you find that going over your head and want updates that won’t.)

I’m not exactly the target audience (nothing beyond CSS and basic linux stuff) but there were some links marked easier to understand and little in the way of summary, so I read it all to gather what I could. This is what it looks like to me:
( Read more... )

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making a production out of it: the gap in fandom social media

2014-03-09T14:20:39Z

Yet another thought that I only realized after the fact was too long for Twitter

(3:04) Posting on DW feels so weird and artificial when I'm used to Twitter and Tumblr.

(3:05) It feels like making an Event out of what seems like just more of the same disconnected babble that is always in my head.

(3:06) Like in order to qualify for a Blog Entry, it should be a position piece, or a reminiscence, not just 20x too long for Twitter.

(3:06) But I can't start posting these things on Tumblr, because Tumblr is like 98:2 noise: signal and the tagging system is shit.

(3:07) ... Not to mention the COMMENTING system, geez. I am not comfortable having personal interactions or conversations there. Awkward & weird.

These tweets on Storify

The gap between Twitter, Tumblr, and DW is long stuff that doesn't seem all that important but which you nonetheless might want comments on and/or would like indexed and taggable.

...

Dreamwidth's (or rather, LJ-style) calendar-based archive browsing, the ability to bundle and rename tags and to label memories, and the nested commenting and notification/tracking features on DW are too useful to me as a blog owner to just abandon.

And for fandom purposes, LJ-style comment pages, notification and tracking features, and the community concept are similarly indispensible, until we get another good non-instantaneous mailing list/messageboard substitue.

But the filtering functionality you can get on Tumblr with Xkit or even just Tumblr savior, not to mention the ease of posting and embedding media and the reblog+comment concept, are still irresistable - and that doesn't even touch on the ability to search and browse across the site by tags, which is a huge boon to fandom.

( What would the ideal solution have to look like, anyway? What do I even want? )

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cimorene @ 2012-02-02T11:25:00

2012-02-02T09:27:43Z

I have plenty of dreamwidth codes...

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trials & tribulations of tagging

2010-09-05T18:46:02Z

I make a plebefic header post just about every day (Science suggests that in the past year the average is 1 day in 2). That's a lot of posts. When I started saving them and posting them 5 per day, in summer 2007, I really had no notion that it was going to become such a long-term thing. At that point, all the scattered occasions I'd posted them in the past had simply been tagged "badfic", so I kept that tag on them until last week.

Aaaaand as a result, my "badfic" tag was completely unusable for finding any posts except the header posts. Whenever I'd want to find a specific old post from that tag, I'd have to wade through pages and pages of headers instead.

The obvious solution was to remove the "badfic" tag from the header posts only, but I couldn't think how. I thought there ought to be some kind of batch-edit function. Dreamwidth does have an Edit Entries page, but you can't batch edit tags the way you can edit metadata in many music players. And anyway, I'd have to be able to take "Posts tagged with 'badfic' and 'headers & summaries'" as the group to edit, then overwrite all the tags on those posts with just one (in order to delete the tag from those posts but leave it on other ones). Dreamwidth doesn't yet have "and" filtering for tags, and Edit Entries doesn't work by tag anyway - the only thing you can do with posts grouped by tag is rename or delete their tags. And there's not a way to search for "Posts tagged 'X' but not 'Y'".

At first I thought that such a batch-edit feature might be useful, so I was considering submitting it to dw_suggestions, but then I realized it usually wouldn't be very useful. If you're talking about batch-editing all posts with a certain tag or combination of tags, it would certainly be useful to be able to re-set the security on all of them at once or to delete all of them at once (this might already be in the pipeline - I'm not sure, but it sounds familiar), but the ability to edit all their tags at once? In order to batch-edit the tags, you'd have to overwrite what was already there, and how often would you want to take a group of posts which all have different combinations of tags and erase all of those, thereby losing information? You usually wouldn't. You'd want to rename a single tag, everywhere it appeared.

waxjism thought I'd have to go through the "headers & summaries" tag and manually delete the "badfic" tag from each and every post, which would probably have taken the next six months or more (more, probably, because I'd get bored and give up). Fortunately I realized I could do it backwards: what I did instead was skim backwards through the "badfic" tag, opening every post that wasn't to do with plebefic headers in a new window (total: 79; total posts tagged "headers & summaries": 336). In the "edit tags" page for each entry I deleted "badfic" and replaced it with a new tag, "greeble". When that was done I deleted the "badfic" tag from the Manage Tags page, then renamed "greeble" to "badfic". It was still labor-intensive compared with how I wish the internet/computers worked, but at least I was able to finish in a couple of hours.

It's so annoying when you are completely sure that the computer should be able to do this (like Delicious.com! It should be able to filter out all duplicates on the Recent page instead of showing every single person who saved something!) and it just can't (yet).

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Blogging: A 10-year retrospective

2010-04-07T10:20:35Z

I was thinking the other day about how I have pared down the uses to which I subject this, my main blog! When I was 19 or 20, sometimes I'd make up to 17 posts a day. I used to post to livejournal:

★ Links to stories I really liked as I read them; today I post these to cimness via bookmarklet as I go.

Before Delicious, I kept an html file open at all times in which I put other recs in the order I read them, writing them up as I went, and every month or so I'd sort them by fandom and upload the new ones to the frontpage of my recs site, then go through and individually add them to the alphabetized fandom pages. Delicious has made my life a lot better.

★ Amusing quotes from badfic as I read it; today I save these and post them in daily batches of five.

★ Links to political & interesting news items, and blog posts from other sites; today I post these to cimness as I go (though today there are more of them, since I didn't follow Cake Wrecks, FailBlog, I Can Has Cheezburger, or the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks in 2002).

★ Beautiful images I stumbled across; today I post these to cimness (along with lots, lots more images).

★ Quotes from whatever book I was reading that I particularly loved; today I post these to cimness.

★ Random thoughts as they crossed my mind; today I post these to cimness, and when I used to, even as a teenie, occasionally feel constrained not to post every thought, that's actually the whole point of Twitter, which is nice.

In fact, of all the things I used to post, the only ones that remain are

★ Rants and essays and thoughts about fandom, and

★ Diary-like recollections from my life.

Now I also post organized sets of plebefic headers and shoes regularly, but I didn't start those until later.

In conclusion: ten years have brought wondrous advances to the world of blogging technology! Almost all of these acts of posting are a lot easier now than they were then, too. The only thing that isn't is posting to Dreamwidth, because I don't have an awesome Linux client for it to compare with Semagic back in the day (though I saw someone posting about a new one recently, I didn't feel up to investigating it).

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LJ-crossposting to stop

2010-03-12T18:03:29Z

After my post a week and a half ago in which I said that I'd been thinking about taking my content off LJ, I didn't actually do it - not so much because I wasn't sure that it was a good idea as because I was lazy. But, you know, it only happens if you actually do it, as I realized rather abruptly when I read merryish's post here. Advocating such a move without making the move myself as I did is a bit like campaigning without voting, so I'm not going to be crossposting to lj anymore. This presents little problem nowadays, as I've basically stopped using the filter/lock functions of my journal anyway, which is the only barrier to syndication. It's easy enough to follow the journal via RSS if you want to.

It's also easy to comment on Dreamwidth using your LJ account - just login using the OpenID option and your lj info.

And as previously stated, I have 17 DW invite codes which I'll happily give to anyone who isn't a spambot.

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Seriously, lj? (Seriously, fandom?)

2010-03-05T09:00:45Z

I just want to point out that after removing the undeclared gender option after all (itself after saying they weren't going to) and beginning to use pop-up ads with malware, last ~~night~~ (apparently it was some weeks ago, but took a while to spot) LJ accidentally (I mean, they claim, but I believe them) added scripts that redirect all outbound links to certain business sites which add their referrer information at the expense of accidentally stripping everyone else's. After a few hours of people complaining, they got to work removing the code again and explained themselves, so that should all be over now, although I'm sure I'll see the rest of fandom discovering the old news without noticing the ETAs for a week.

Look, sure, LJ's been falling down and getting back up for years, ever since it stopped being a garage project and became a business, and that is normal. Yes, businesses want to make money, and for years I was the first cynic to eyeroll and say "What did you expect?" every time it happened. The fact that we expect businesses to try to screw us over if they can, and the fact that in LJ's case they frequently didn't even mean to screw up, doesn't mean we should just sit back and do nothing about it. After a certain point I, at least, get disgusted enough to walk away. To use a real-world business metaphor, I'd rather go a bit out of my way to buy a service from someone who isn't known to frequently, for example, destroy one's dry-cleaning or give one the wrong order out of incompetence. (This is why my dad and I stopped using Kinko's when I was a kid, and it actually was much less convenient to use the University printer - their business hours, for one thing. And their much smaller selection of paper. They were cheaper, though.)

I don't mind the ads - in fact I ignore them and can get rid of them easily - and I don't worry about malware because I'm running a reasonably secure Linux system. But that doesn't stop badly-designed ad scripts from screwing up the page loading on a regular basis, so that for example, the links on the page only work if I click my Readability style bookmarklet (I use eBook with medium margins) to strip the existing style before the page finishes loading all the way. And hey, ads don't piss me off in themselves - that's how the Internet pays for itself. On the other hand, malware and scripts that break the page (or the referrer link) do piss me off, because it's kind of nice, when people are trying to make money from other people's computer use, if they don't then make it impossible to keep using the computer. Seriously? You couldn't browser-test it? (And malware breaks your computer on purpose if you're running Windows and don't quite know what you're doing, and hey, it's ultimately my fault that my mother and clueless little sister sometimes visit livejournal, so, yeah, I'm pissed off.)

I've had three people in the past few weeks, one of them my wife, say they stopped using Dreamwidth because everyone they know wants to comment on LJ except me. My wife says she never gave them money in the first place (someone surprised her with a permanent account years ago), so she has nothing on her conscience. And look, I have people who keep commenting on my lj entries too, and am fortunate that the whole meta/media fandom circle with which I typically interact was the first one to move. It's too bad that I keep missing the comments on lj or getting them late because going to the lj site to read my flist there or check my comments is so practically and morally unpleasant. The thing is, if you keep using lj because other people are doing it, you're providing the content that lj is selling. You're part of the giant ball-and-chain anchoring fandom to lj. I don't want to be part of that. (I keep thinking about deleting all my content from lj, not that it would hurt them, but just because it irritates me to have it there. And to have to go there to answer comments on it.)

And I have Dreamwidth codes (seventeen of them), as does everyone I see on Dreamwidth, because the demand slowed down a long time before the supply did. At this point I have ceased to expect that anyone will ask for one, but there it is! I'll give one to anyone who isn't a spambot.

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the next stage of moving house

2009-12-27T12:37:45Z

Well, my paid lj account has finally expired! I'm a bit relieved to be rid of it, in fact. Since I opened commenting in both places, I've had very few on lj, which I didn't really expect. It's interesting - and nice! - to reflect that I am so firmly situated in the segment of fandom that has moved house. I've seen other people's posts via metafandom indicating that that isn't the case for them, and that would be distressing.

So I've successfully moved my picture hosting now to Google's Picasa. If you have a gmail or other google account, you can sign in there, and link them up easily; and you can tag, caption, re-order, embed, export links, etc etc, as well as sharing your albums to allow selected other people to modify them - this last is already a huge step up in functionality (and even if I weren't finding it useful I'd still find it awesome because eee! Living in the future!). The only downside to Picasa I have so far discovered is that I have to use the Picasa program to upload; it doesn't integrate with the desktop browser (in my case, since I'm using Gnome-Ubuntu-based Linux Mint, Nautilus).

Surprisingly enough, it seems the zillion images that are already in my lj picture folders haven't been deleted. I don't know if they just haven't gotten around to it or what. If they do all get deleted, I'm sorry to say I won't be fixing all the links in my shoe posts - it's just way, way too many to go back and manually re-code all of them.

What I hadn't considered was that not giving lj any more money would mean I see ads now. I believe it used to be the case that basic accounts didn't have to see ads when they were logged in, only plus accounts? But I can't find any way to turn them off. It's really annoying to have ads tacked onto the end (or beginning) of a story you're attempting to read - even more annoying than reading on LJ already was. Seriously, people putting your fic on LJ, move into the 21st century, for Bob's sake, and get a Dreamwidth and/or A03 invite! Everyone has more DW invites than they know what to do with, and the waiting list for AO3 codes is quite short. Just mosey over there and stick your email on it.

I've also reached a happy stage of only checking my lj flist - for a handful of journals, but mostly for the communities that haven't moved - every couple of days.

I'm never going to get rid of my lj account entirely because I will need it for commenting, if nothing else. But I can't wait until dw's read-your-lj-flist functionality rolls out.

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idle daydreaming: a world where every personal journal had a new-reader faq

2009-11-09T12:31:36Z

I read in dw_suggestions that Dreamwidth now has a feature for community maintainers that allows you to set it so new members who join a community are automatically taken to an FAQ post. What a useful feature! The landscape of fandom would change SO DRASTICALLY that it's sort of hard to imagine what it would even be like if noobs stopped posting without following the rules, you know?

Which brings me to personal journals. As ridic as that would be, sometimes I think it'd be good to do something like that for those too. Bob knows there have been innumerable incidents on both sides (people I should have had a quick-start intro to when I started reading their journals for ease of comprehension, and people who obviously missed the quick-start info displayed prominently in my profile from their initial comments assuming that I live in the US, that I'm actually Finnish, that I'm not gay, that I agree with them that Fandom Wank & Mean Girls Everywhere are teh ebil, that I'm not a jew, that I obviously agree with them that gender-normative clothing IRL/the media is fun/empowering and not sexist).

Many of the former just continue to breed confusion, because it's kind of hard to find that stuff as a latecomer to a journal if it's not in the userinfo (which it often isn't, since many people like to keep that stuff somewhat private - which makes perfect sense). Even if someone is a religious user of tags, you can't really go through all of them looking for the clue.

Most of the latter require at most a few sentences' elucidation, but every now and then they stick me in the position of leaving a comment completely unreplied to because it's trying to initiate one of those conversations I've had a million times and got tired of a long time ago, like "But, hey, you guys, on the subject of RPS, I just had a thought: how would YOU feel?" (NB: Not an actual example from my journal. At least, not that I can remember. On the other hand, that happens all the time to fandom, which is unfortunately not able to direct all noobs to Fanlore and the Fandom Wank Wiki before they post anywhere.)

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woo

2009-11-02T14:08:21Z

So, I spent about 14 hours in the Dreamwidth Styles Vortex last night trying to:

Fix the flaws in the other themes of my style which I shared publicly a long time ago

Make a few new styles

Separate every theme out into two levels (fonts & sizes vs. colors & background images)

Migrate hard-coded CSS elements to DWS2C2 elements which can be customized by the end-user via the wizard

Take every single theme I separated out and put them all back together (because the wizard only allows 1 theme layer and the User layer is auto-generated, so the colors kinda have to go in the theme after all)

Well... on the minus side, I became glassy eyed, stayed up till 6am, and didn't finish. And didn't finish reading the bunch of open story tabs I meant to read either. On the plus side, I figured out how it worked and successfully got the wizard working, even though I didn't finish bringing the themes over, and it actually is pretty easy.

On the OTHER minus side, I then slept too late to go to the post office yet AGAIN (post office closes at 4, I think, until Christmas season starts. Or maybe it's 6? I can never make sense of these bizarre Finnish business hours). I have it on good authority that the package contains 3 separate pieces of Iittala china from my Wonderkilling Grandpa Bob and his wife, which is Wax's and my first wedding present of the traditional type.

I woke up today and hooked my mouse and monitor back to Six again (because a WinBorg machine will not boot up and run without interface devices - LAME), turned my computer on in server mode, and copied all the files I've accumulated there over, then turned them both off and switched back over, so I'm now booted up at home on Leia and with all the bookmarks and images I've saved in the past few weeks moved back over. Plus, like 12 hours ago Wax finally got Samba working on Kubuntu again. Apparently the problem is that it doesn't come built into KDE the way it does in Gnome. So our LAN is back at last.

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css fix for profile module in my dw layout (Paper Me)

2009-05-18T12:46:52Z

A brand-new codepush has just adjusted the layout of the Userprofile module in the sidebar (ie default icon, display name, and the add-to-circle/send message/tell a friend link icons), and it affects the Paper Me layout I've made. It's not broken, per se, because that's how they wanted it, so you can use it if you like; but if not, here's ( how to put it back )

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6 more themes for my dw layout

2009-05-09T20:52:56Z

6 more themes for my original dreamwidth layout, Paper Me, which I posted yesterday here (same instructions, 13 other themes). Despite being a brilliant-colored creature at heart, I added some slightly more dignified/soothing/low-contrast/neutral color schemes (and also some brilliant, one might say neon-colored ones). ( Read more... )

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