Dreamwidth: The Nifty Things You Might Not Know

I just set up OpenID at my woefully out-of-date but pithier URL of http://metawidget.net. Like my e-mail over there, the idea is to future-proof my online identity: I more or less own my own domain, whereas it is possible that Dreamwidth, myOpenID, Livejournal or whoever else will do something I don't like (or just be reduced to a smoking crater by a DDoS or an antitrust lawsuit or something). Through the miracle of OpenID delegation, if I get sick of whatever site is doing the OpenID listing, I just fire them, change these two lines, and keep my OpenID. Also, it might motivate me to clean up my site, archive some stuff, and all that.

Here are the two lines:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid/server">
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://metawidget.dreamwidth.org">

They go in the head element of index.html, or whatever other page loads by default when hitting the domain. The first line indicates where the server doing the heavy OpenID lifting** is located. The second line gives my OpenID over there, which if someone claiming to be metawidget.net wants to be authenticated, they will need to convince Dreamwidth's servers that I am metawidget.dreamwidth.org. If I get sick of being vouched for by Dreamwidth, I just change those two lines to a new provider (the form of the first URL varies from provider to provider, the form of the second is just the usual URL you use for OpenID). Note that I don't include my metawidget.net OpenID in those two lines: that is covered by the fact that those two lines can be found at metawidget.net. Also note that I don't have to register this delegation with Dreamwidth: the only place the delegation exists is on a page I control. The whole shebang relies on the assumption that only I can go and stick code in the head element of whatever comes up at the URL of the OpenID I'm claiming.

There is a presumably out-of-date (at least no longer mainained) PHP script that lets you set up a tiny single-user OpenID server on your own machine, but almost everyone who might want an OpenID on their own domain has another OpenID sitting somewhere.

This post is basically a re-hash with commentary of the technical information I found on Stack Exchange.

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*assuming you have an OpenID somewhere else

**by which I mean “lifting I don't want to do”

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cross-posted to metawidget

Did you know that you can shortcut what journal/community you would like to post to?
I didn't until today. Pretty simple though. 

Lets say, for example, you wanted to post something to dw_nifty  Simply go to http://dw_nifty.dreamwidth.org/update, and you will be automagically redirected to the update page, with the "Post to:" field already filled in and ready to go. 
You can also go to http://www.dreamwidth.org/update.bml?usejournal=dw_nifty , but I'm not sure how long that will last considering bml is supposed to be going away Real Soon Now. 

Fair warning, this does NOT check that you actually have permissions to post to that journal (It does the check when you clicky the post button). But, it's a handy shortcut to have, no?

This is a feature we merged into Dreamwidth from LiveJournal, with thanks, a while ago--you can use the "poster" argument to filter posts in a community: ?poster=USERNAME. So, for instance, to get all of my posts in dw_nifty:

http://dw-nifty.dreamwidth.org/?poster=foxfirefey

A few times I've noted questions about the @import feature for embedding fonts into customized layouts. At current, Dreamwidth hasn't decided to implement that, but users can embed fonts into their Dreamwidth layouts with a little help from Google Web Fonts. Google.com is continuously uploading and hosting a variety of fonts, free for use, and it's very quick to pop one into a Dreamwidth layout using the external stylesheet link. Jump behind the cut for a quick tutorial.

How do you use fonts hosted on Google on your Dreamwidth layout?
Tutorial Type: CSS/Customization
Difficulty: Medium
( Continue to the Tutorial )

Update: Multiple fonts are supported! To request multiple font families, separate the names with a pipe character (|). For example, to request the fonts Tangerine, Inconsolata, and Droid Sans: http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine|Inconsolata|Droid+Sans

Given that I couldn't see anything to do this already, http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~adamb/dwthemes.cgi is a tool to ease the sharing of non-public mood themes. Suggestions for improving it welcome.

(Posted this to dw_dev, but been told it might fit here better)

I have done a fast-and-dirty modification of the LJ Instant Comment Greasemonkey userscript to make it work for DW, which is located here. If you already have Greasemonkey installed in Firefox, it should automatically ask you if you want to install it; otherwise do whatever you normally do to make userscripts work for you.

The only modification was to swap in DW for LJ; it should otherwise work as before. Unfortunately that is about my limit for doing stuff in JavaScript, so I probably can't help you with further customizations.

It's taken me approximately forever to accomplish this bug, for which I apologize, but I am proud to announce: Persistant style=mine and light and site is here!

You can find the relevant settings in the display section: Entry View Style and Journal View Style.

Site style viewing isn't available yet for Journal View Style, but I'm working on the CSS to make that happen.

For those of you who don't know Dreamwidth styles powerhouse ninetydegrees well enough, she has a community at dotitfileit where she posts skins for the Dreamwidth site. This is a great resource for those of you who aren't into any of the current official site skins!

After I added a LibraryThing widget to my own DW blog, I got some requests to share the technique in this group. Finally, I'm getting around to writing something up.

The first widget developed at LibraryThing for posting on blogs was written in JavaScript. But Dreamwidth, like its parent site LiveJournal, doesn't allow for inclusion of such script-based widgets on its journals. (If this is no longer a limitation, I hope someone in the know will correct me.) Sooo, a clever person over at LT developed an image-based widget that lives just fine on LJ-style sites.

The LT blog post describing how to use the widget: Graphical Widgets for LJ and etc..

While detailed, the above blog post might still be confusing for folks not very familiar with HTML or especially argument strings on URLs. So I'll provide a detailed breakdown of the options I used to produce my own widget (seen at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar of my journal).

( My own LT widget )

Given the number of new people coming to Dreamwidth, I thought I'd post about some things that people who have been here from the beginning will probably already know, but that new people might well find come in the "nifty" category. So, without further ado:

• The Dreamwidth Business FAQs. Separate from our normal FAQs, these are written directly by the owners, and give a lot of detail about how the internal runnings of Dreamwidth work, why the site was created, and such things. Do take a look - there's some very nifty stuff in there.


• The Dreamwidth Wiki. You can find some good current information on DW in here, as well as some historical articles (for example, we discussed what we should name certain features on the wiki). You can also find various DW-themed icons, links to lots of awesome articles, and for the more technically-inclined, information on how to help develop Dreamwidth's codebase.
  
  Suffice to say, the wiki is a veritable treasure trove of information. :D


• The dw-discuss mailing list archive is what we used to discuss Dreamwidth before Dreamwidth even existed. There are lots of interesting things here, including a post on how we could be reasonably sure that this service wouldn't die, a detailed explanation on why à la carte features are bad for the service, and more. There's also the dw-progress mailing list archive, which was the equivalent of dw_news before we had it, but without the replies - those went to dw-discuss.
  
  Of course, not everything in these posts will be up-to-date, because they're historical by nature; posts can't be updated after they've been posted. It's worth bearing this in mind when you go through the list posts.

As someone who loves to delve into the history behind services like DW, I'm glad we still have these resources to look through - there's so much information in them, both current and historical, and I hope you find them as nifty as I do!