More Dreamwidth-y goodness.

More material about making yourself at home on Dreamwidth. Things like useful HTML markup for making your entries better. sylvaine also has a great guide for HTML and Dreamwidth. jessie_the_k reminds us that if you're familiar with Markdownm you can use that to compose posts with. That also alloows for a certain amount of @usernaming, if that's the form you're wanting to work with.

muccamukk offers a custom CSS rule you can implement that will prevent the display of any content in a comment by a person you do not wish to see. It only works when you're logged in, and because it's custom styling, it'll only work everywhere if you insist in your settings that all pages use your style when you load them. It's not a ban. It's just a "nope, whatever that user has to say is unimportant or otherwise not worth seeing" for you.

melannen built on astolat's bookmarklet to capture text and create a new post with that quoted text and proper attribution for you so that it now will tell you if you're trying to quote a locked post. Great if you find a thing, you want to say "THIS, THIS, THIS!" and make a post about it in the proper way of the Dreamwidth. legionseagle has a great wander through, among a discussion about conventions on Dreamwidth, why the One Ring is a terrible thing to use as a forefeit for wrongdoing.

corvidology has the lowest-pressure friending post possible - just say yes in the comments so people know you're interested in making friends.


If you'd like a place to move your text work to from Tumblr or anywhere else that runs the threat of being shut down when the advertisers say "no more monkeys jumping on the bed," the AO3 is there for you. Specifically there to host your works in a place where there won't be those kinds of pressures. OTW Legal also talks about the things that can be linked in to AO3 works, and the sorts of things they are and aren't able to do with regard to the Tumblr purge.

Also, that post might mean I'm sitting on a lot of Archive invitations. I'm sure I can figure out how to find and use them if people do not already have Archive accounts.

You can link specific users, not only on DW, but also sites that are on the approved list for linking, and their appropriate userhead will appear. So if you wanted to do silveradept, for example, you totally can. The current list of approved sites is in one of the FAQs. musyc also mentioned that each account has a certain number of comments-back they can look, if by chance, the notifications were deleted before the comment could be responded to.

musyc also reminds us that there are more than a few options for choosing how DW looks to you and others in your options page, that tags can be searched and combine-searched, there's an inbox for messages and notifications, that you can set keyboard and device shortcuts for faster browsing, and the beta entries page has a lot of really good functionality.

potofsoup has a tag called DW How-To that contains advice on doing things in a Tumblr way if you are new to DW.

A second round of community recs from sylvaine. and more community recs from rydra_wong.

absolutedestiny has a guide to setting up an account with a cloud storage host so that vidfic or podfic or other such things can be served up for inexpensively if your not-text content should take off like a rocket. There's also a second bit about using a Content Delivery Network if you do get that fame and you need to have your content in multiple easy places for your fans to grab stuff from.

And after that, tozka started a discussion from comments left on a Mastodon instance about fandom's changing demographics, which led into a discussion about what Dreamwidth communities are for and can be used for. In the comments to that second post is advice from those who run and moderate communities about ways of making it more likely you'll succeed. ovembermond has more on how to successfully find active communities on DW.

Most importantly, though, is that Dreamwidth is not a place where everything has to be all seriousness, even if it appears to be that way (kore says so). Admittedly, we are the kind of place that will spawn a discussion about what defines a shitpost. (rydra_wong would like to know.) And the kind of place that will take such a declaration as kore's and craft a challenge for the month of February to use one's Dreamwidth specifically for shitposting (as well as everything else you use it for). Not to be outdone, then melannen created a randomizer to give you topics to talk about off the top of your keyboard and then made a post with the code so that people to generate their own random shitpost. The pull quote for all of this is in the comments to the code post:

(Despite all the stuff that I agree with about dw posts not having to be elaborate or substantial... it is somehow very dreamwidth that we respond to "dreamwidth is for shitposting" by doing things like creating challenges, teaching javascript, and having a symposium on definitions.)

It really is exactly that, and perfectly Dreamwidth. So there's an idea of what you might be getting into, but it'll be fun, we promise.