azurelunatic

Hi! If I've added you to my reading list in the past, um, since reading filters were introduced, and I haven't commented and you thought I would have by now, this is likely because I have not been seeing your entries on my reading page.

This is due to the actually really dumb way the default reading filter is handled.

Ordinarily I don't think Dreamwidth development decisions are dumb, but since I just had a complete crying meltdown over what I'm hoping is an oversight and not a development decision, and had to turn off the contextual hover menu (I love the contexual hover menu kind of a lot) because otherwise I will use it to add people and since I have clearly forgotten this in the past I will forget it again, yeah, I'm calling it dumb. (Not the people involved, but the feature.) Mostly I use the filter to keep the "hi I have codes here" from dw_codesharing off my page, which means that when someone posts one untagged, I will see it and tag it straight away.

If you're adding someone and you didn't mean for them to be in there, and they show up on your reading page, you can see that and alter your filters. If you add someone and expect that they will be in there, and they are not, you don't see this until something makes you realize it. So while I recognize it would be obnoxious for people who don't use the default reading filter the way I do, I think the impact is worse like this.

I didn't realize until now that this was such a dealbreaker for me.

So, yeah, hi. I ordinarily read stuff but sometimes the machines get in the way.

Right now there's Stuff going on with a bunch of trolls vs. Dreamwidth. The owners are asking that people see to their account security (including not falling for phishing emails), continue business as usual (minus any insecure account practices), and if you have the spare money, please consider donating to a charity that is helping out Haiti (the trolling is annoying but people in Haiti are dying).

http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/16338.html
http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/16590.html

(On a personal note, if you have the money to donate, consider donating in a way that does not lock up the money specifically to this disaster. It seems like a good idea -- earmark this money to rush it to this specific crisis, help them now! -- but the organizations are surely spending out of their "PLEH PLEH EMERGENCY!!!" and general funds until the donations arrive, and if emergency and general funds are not replenished too, they may be financially unprepared for the next catastrophe.)

Dreamwidth has a latest NaNo posts tag feed: http://www.dreamwidth.org/latest?tag=nnwm09

This is going to be fun.

Disclosures: I volunteer for both LiveJournal and Dreamwidth; I keep my journal on both LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, largely mirrored, with occasional posts to InsaneJournal. I condense the ephemera of my impressions into generalizations; if I am lucky, I can remember where I was to have gotten that impression.


I think Dreamwidth has helped save LiveJournal.

No, really; I think that LiveJournal is in a much better place right now than it was six months ago. It may even be in a better place than it was a year ago. I'm feeling more general enthusiasm and hope than I was then, and most especially, I'm no longer experiencing the quickly-repressed desire to pack up my journal and flee into the night (with the exception of my Suggestions duties, as I wouldn't leave Carrie in the lurch like that, as my shoes would be hard to fill).

I haven't been paying steady or close attention to news comments for a while, not since the level of animosity against SUP, LiveJournal in general, and some actual personal friends reached full shriek. I had better things to do, like kiss a facehugger. I have checked back intermittently, and I have noticed a change in the last two months. It seems to me that the people who had been speaking out with the most anger and betrayal about LiveJournal's decisions have finished migrating off the service.

I just didn't see that same level of pain and outrage the last time I looked. Annoyance? Oh, yes, plenty. A la carte userpics were promised, but there hasn't been much of an update on the progress there. "My Guests"? Oh, yes, that's getting the classic debate, where people who will opt out and never use it complain about its very existence, and people wonder who would use it and why it was even implemented (it's a frequent request in suggestions, for the record). But the anguish has dramatically lowered.

The launch of Dreamwidth has played a role in that drop-off in a way that no other alternate journal service has. I did not see the same level of drop-off in user anguish with the large migrations to GreatestJournal and InsaneJournal -- indeed, if anything, there was just an additional element to some of the complaints.

( GreatestJournal, InsaneJournal, Dreamwidth, ease of migration, backups, Open Source, antagonistic users vs customer service, and my observations. )

And no longer embattled with the same factions of the userbase, LiveJournal responds, with further attention to detail in new feature rollouts, and a high level of responsiveness to beta feedback. LiveJournal is changing. LiveJournal is up and running and starting to actively develop instead of just treading water. I can taste the way the development team is providing output as a fully operational team once more when I look at lj_releases. Stuff from suggestions is bubbling through. Releases seem to be happening more smoothly. Promising new volunteers are starting to pop back in. Code patches shuffle back and forth, today Dreamwidth picking up a new feature from LiveJournal, tomorrow LiveJournal snagging a bug fix from Dreamwidth.

The project rolls on, and the userbases of all LiveJournal-based sites are the more secure for having more talent devoted to the project, and another viable option.


Cross-site chatter: Dreamwidth, LiveJournal

Goodness gracious, but do I love Google Analytics. I see that occasionally search engines are bringing people to my journal! Sometimes it does not seem as if my journal answers these questions. I shall endeavor to answer some of them!

Crossposting from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth

This phrasing seems to have come up -- a more useful one might be "crossposting between LiveJournal and Dreamwidth". It is difficult to crosspost putting LiveJournal first and have your entries be useful on both sites.

You can:

Cross-post manually
Cross-post through Dreamwidth
Cross-post through a client
Post to LiveJournal, then import (people who read you on Dreamwidth won't see your posts on their reading page)
Post at one site, then have everybody on the other site read a syndicated feed of your entries (public only at this time, unless you're using an RSS reader that authenticates)


( In detail! )



How do you link to a Dreamwidth username on LiveJournal?

Two ways.

Are you cross-posting using Dreamwidth's crossposter? Easy. Just type in <user name="example-dw-user">, and the crossposter is smart enough to make it happen on LiveJournal all nice and pretty (and point it to Dreamwidth, not point to the user of the same name on LiveJournal).

Are you posting to LiveJournal directly (or directly through a client)? Not quite so easy. Have some nice HTML; substitute the relevant username where appropriate (there are a couple places). This HTML, by the way, is what the crossposter spits out. (Remember: don't shove this in the RTE, as it will come out ugly.)

( Graphic HTML. )


If you're looking for codes to create a Dreamwidth account, check out dw_codesharing. Some people occasionally post codes in dreamwidth; some other people sometimes toss them to the winds on Twitter.


Then there are my older and much-linked-about entries Similarities and Differences between LiveJournal and Dreamwidth (that I have noticed so far) and Dreamwidth OpenID and You (How Much for Just the OpenID?), in which I ramble on at some length, and betray my love for parenthetical statements in entry titles, and show exactly how much of a Classic Trek geek I really am.


The big-eyed alien from the new Star Trek movie, the cute little guy who hangs out with Scotty, is named Keenser.

singularity, ncc_1701, and st_xi_kink all have vast quantities of Star Trek Reboot fanfic. I share my real time fic recs and much much more on Twitter. I archive my Twitter on LiveJournal. I try to tag my fic recs, but it doesn't always happen, particularly when it's twitter posts. See the journals of synecdochic and ivorygates for their writings. Fear death by fanfic.

Last screening run bookmark: http://dw-codesharing.dreamwidth.org/1096.html?format=light&page=56&view=flat#comments (will not make much sense to anyone who is not an admin there as there aren't that many pages for you-all.)

Sometimes, I think that some parts of this must be the best of all possible universes, for I would be hard-pressed to imagine one better. (Other times, not so much, but this is one of the good times.) Part 1: dinner!

Friday night, there was the Dreamwidth Open Beta Party at the Delancey Street Restaurant. I got gloriously lost on my way there, because a vague disclaimer is no-one's friend when it comes to public transportation, particularly public transportation where the correct connection information varies depending on time of day. Happily for me and my sour mood, my pathetic nod to "Trying to Communicate" resulted in a direct message from jd, a desperate call back from me, and subsequent directions back down underground to seek train-time. I arrived safely, albeit late.

Attending were: ataniell93, jamoche, damned_colonial, gracecourage, someone with long green hair whose name I did not catch, zdashamber, whump, cynthia1960, and me. There may have been someone else as well.

On my way there, some more Dreamwidth as compared to LiveJournal similarities/differences had struck me, so I was tumbling those things over and over in my brain. There was game-chatter. There was fandom-chatter. I networked with whump a bit (and downloaded Second Life, much to my amazement, upon returning home). Partway through all of it, I got a bright idea and started grinning like a maniac as I scribbled bits and pieces down. No, not fic or game, geek meta, an expansion on some of the stuff that had been forming on BART. There was locality-chatter, and ancestry, and all manner of fun.

There was dessert. Glorious hot fudge sundae, how I love you. Oh, iPhone, how you taunt me, there is no way to set a custom tone for the arrival of a text message for a single sender. (If there had been, I would have assured myself of the instructions, betaken myself to my computer, recorded "HEY MARK! HEY MARK! HEY MARK!" on the good microphone, then packaged up the lot to send to synecdochic so she could tamper with xb95's phone while he was sleeping, awaiting the next text message from nagios. Oh, how I amuse myself.)


Upon arriving home, life abruptly became less-awesome, as my friends page brought me the unwelcome news of Gordy (Mr. Out)'s death. It still doesn't seem real, quite. I tried to figure out Second Life and then started compiling my tribute (which his mother found on a Google trawl this evening).

In the last 24 hours, I posted the following to Twitter:

• Wednesday, 2356: @semanticist Worked properly! <3
• Thursday, 0933: I'm at Serramonte Center - http://bkite.com/04M4o
• Thursday, 1041: My cousin will appreciate this: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1136
• Thursday, 1115: Something that's been bothering me forever: http://community.livejournal.com/changelog/6968224.html
• Thursday, 1131: @phoenixdreaming Plan does involve converting OpenID to Real Account, so OpenID up if you haven't already and jump in.
( read the other 14 )

Follow me on Twitter.

In the last 24 hours, I posted the following to Twitter:

• Tuesday, 0136: Feeling in-general much better.
• Tuesday, 0955: I turned up the brightness on poor Thalia the laptop here, and SUDDENLY I CAN SEE AGAIN!! (Weirdly backlit living room is weirdly backlit.)
• Tuesday, 1002: ... the internet gave me homework.
• Tuesday, 1004: @Celtic_Maenad Yeah: sea-kittens = "has lost all touch with reality"; this = "and has started to dig"
• Tuesday, 1044: What went wrong in Australia? Nature is a fucking bitch in Australia. http://blamebrampton.livejournal.com/70890.html
( read the other 29 )

Follow me on Twitter.