Dreamwidth: The Nifty Things You Might Not Know

Feed sub bookmarklet

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:57:39 GMT

Having switched from Firefox to Chrome, one of the things I was missing was an easy way to sub feeds to DW, then my brain switched on.

Usual score, create a new bookmark (I called mine DW feed sub) in a folder you can get to quickly (or yout bookmarks bar, or whatever) and paste the following into the location bar:
click it when on the actual feed and it'll sub that feed, if you're just on the site it'll follow the usual DW method of working out which feed to select.

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Six-degrees

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:53:46 GMT

If anyone is interested how you and another DW are connected ( by following mutual trust, watch, etc...), I have a ~~"six-degrees" tool~~ ( ETA: Tool is down, if there is any interest, I can drop the raw data file I was using + a spec for the file here in a few days )

Please note that this is a cached data grab from around the middle of last month, any changes or newly created accounts since then will not show up.

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Your own domain as an OpenID in two lines*

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 21:58:44 GMT

I just set up OpenID at my woefully out-of-date but pithier URL of http://metawidget.net.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.

*assuming you have an OpenID somewhere else

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

cross-posted to metawidget

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I has found shortcut.

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:26:39 GMT

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?

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Filter community posts by the user posting

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 18:53:29 GMT

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

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Embedding Fonts (via Google)

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 18:00:54 GMT

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

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Mood theme sharing

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 17:26:02 GMT

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)

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Greasemonkey Instant Comment userscript

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:27:44 GMT

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.

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Persistant style=mine (and light, and site)!

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 05:33:31 GMT

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.

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DW site skins

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 02:50:35 GMT

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!

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LibraryThing widgets

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 16:13:16 GMT

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 )

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Some nifty resources!

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:28:53 GMT

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!

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(Almost) hiding feed content on your reading page

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:28:24 GMT

K, in response to a few posts at dw_suggestions, have some CSS to reduce the impact feeds, especially long feed entries, have on your reading page.

( The code itself )
( the Explanation )

( Removing the whole shebang )

Simples. By the way, I'm not using this code myself, I just did it as it was requested, it won't work if the feed uses inline styling to set size (naughty originating site), but I'm happy to have a look if anyone's having problems with it. It would, of course, be a lot easier if the paragraph given the class ".ljsyndicationlink" was followed by a div given a class like ".ljsyndicationcontent", but that's not my call *cough*hint*cough* ;-)

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Feed userpics and custom comment colours

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 21:52:15 GMT

See this post on using CSS to make feed userpics and custom comment colors in matgb's journal!

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Zen Coding userscript

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 04:51:32 GMT

Hi everyone! I'm here to talk to you about the ZenCoding userscript. It is a powerful script that allows you to code HTML using CSS-like syntax in textareas. If you like the script think about checking the homepage of the ZenCoding project from which this script came from to see if your favorite code editor has a plugin!

You can watch a demo video of ZenCoding in action in the Smashing article (you'll find the link for both on the homepage as well as to other resources like a cheatsheet for the available abbreviations.)

As far as I've been able to test the script, the numbering using $ is buggy and only add ones instead of incrementing, and the script messes with the tags box auto-complete (which makes me really sad). But it doesn't mess with the niftier tag auto-complete on the new update page, which makes me less sad.

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Chrome Extension: Dreamwidth inbox new message notifier

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 06:29:17 GMT

So, dee's just made a extension for Chrome that checks your inbox every ten minutes for new messages.

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How to get borders on your dynamic cut tags

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 20:21:27 GMT

The new AJAX-y cut tags are great, but one thing about them is that they don't by default show up with any borders. That's great if you like it the way they are, but if you want to be able to distinguish between open cuts and the rest of the post, it's not easy to tell where the end is.

Thankfully, however, an open cut tag has its own CSS class, so you can customise it on your journal and reading page. Go to the Custom CSS section of the Customize area, and paste this into the box:

.cuttag-open {
  border: 1px dashed black;
  margin: 0.5em;
  padding: 0.5em;
}

Or however you prefer - for example you might prefer a red or black border. But after saving this CSS and refreshing your journal or reading page, you should find that any open cut tags will now have dashed boxes around them. :D

This only works for the dynamic part of the cut tags, unfortunately; going to an entry directly won't allow you to do this. (but maybe I should suggest that as a feature! Mmm, that'd be good.)

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Declutter style=mine

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:19:40 GMT

I like a very clean and simple reading page, so I use style=mine all the time.

afuna taught me this:

( If a user's posts or comments show up a lot in your journal or reading page, and you get confused about who it is because they use so many different icons )

If you get confused about the meta data, like mood, location and music you can remove it from view by putting this in your custom css:

.metadata {display: none;}

ETA:
From poulpette in comments: (paraphrased badly by me, you had better read poulpette's precision here)
To hide mood, location and music but leave the crossposted footer visible:

.metadata-label {display: none;} (Hides "Mood:" etc)
.metadata-item {display: none;} (Hides "Excited" etc)
.metadata li img {display: none;} (Hides the mood image)

Of course you can always see the original icon and original meta data by not using style=mine.

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Importing your public entries to Facebook

Wed, 26 May 2010 23:42:41 GMT

I could have sworn there was a post here on this, but apparently not!

Facebook has a feature where you can import an external feed into your account's Notes. Their help page about this is here.

Basically, you go to this page and enter the feed for your Dreamwidth account:

http://USERNAME.dreamwidth.org/data/atom

Facebook will only be able to see and import the public entries.

Note though that you can only import one feed this way, however!

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NoScript and making comments on Dreamwidth

Wed, 05 May 2010 18:45:35 GMT

So, lately people have been running into XSS filtering problems while trying to make comments on Dreamwidth. I know I've had it come up sometimes, although I haven't been able to replicate it just now.

( Exceptions are coming. )

But we have no such advantage at this time.

In the meantime, apparently NoScript does have instructions on how to let certain pages bypass the filter entirely (Options > Advanced > XSS). I think this would do the trick:

^http://www.dreamwidth.org/talkpost_do$

It doesn't have the same origin matching that the LJ exception does though, so that talkpost_do page (and only that page) would accept POST requests from anywhere, not just dreamwidth.org subdomains. What are the possible consequences of telling somebody to add that to their exceptions? I don't want to give out this advice if it could easily lead to bad consequences. I'm pretty sure we're already fairly protected against such exploits, considering most people don't run NoScript and I haven't heard of ones like this lately, but I am no security expert. Thoughts?

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My three weeks for Dreamwidth offering: user to user graphs

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:42:20 GMT

As part of the Three Weeks for Dreamwidth festival, I am making user to user graphs in memewidth for people who post to three communities and make six comments in six different posts in three different communities! Comment there with links to your participation to receive a nifty graph. Don't feel like you have to rush out and make haphazard posts and comments--the offer will be open for quite a while.

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so you want to text message Dreamwidth

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 04:33:04 GMT

It was suggested by foxfirefey in my journal that I might should post this over here! And I thought about it, and I think she's right: posting via text message is nifty and a lot of people maybe don't realise you can do this on Dreamwidth.

It's a little more complicated to do so here than it is with LJ, because Dreamwidth doesn't have any numbers set up for it at this point, but you can still do this via email posting.

First thing you need to do is figure out what your phone's email address is (yes, it should have one, for purposes of outbound messages at least). This is pretty easy to find out if you don't happen to know the naming protocol for it for your phone service: send a message from your cel phone to your regular email address. The email address that message comes from is the one you need here.

Once you have that in hand, go to Mobile Post Settings (also accessible/editable from the mobile category of your Account Settings). There you will need to enter your phone's email address and a PIN. From the Mobile Post Settings page I linked, you can also set some default settings for posts made from email -- like having a default icon for that purpose, or a default security setting (you can set one of your access filters for that, if you like).

Now, to set it up on your phone you just need to add Dreamwidth as a contact and add the posting email address. The format is going to be yourusername+PIN@post.dreamwidth.org. Send a message to like you would to any other contact and voilà! Text messaging to Dreamwidth.

There are more things you can do with posting via email, actually, like posting to a community, or setting entry metadata like your location, or music. If you're interested, here are the help files. You're probably not going to care as much about those if you're just looking to set up text messaging, but I figured I'd mention.

ETA: Some relevant points have come up in comments. Some providers use a different address depending on if it is a text message or a picture message. Also, even if you know your cel phone email address, you want to send a test message to see what an emailed message from your phone looks like, as your service may add on paragraph or list your phone number in the message itself.

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Xpostulation

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:23:44 GMT

Hi,
I thought I'd leave an update on the progress of Xpostulate, the crossposting blog/microblog client I've been building.

Since last posting here, I've added a number of features, including the insertion of DW specific tags, posting via the xml-rpc api, posting to several more blog services (now includes: DreamWidth, LiveJournal, InsaneJournal, DeadJournal, Inksome, Scribbld, Iziblog, & WordPress...still looking to add blogger/blogspot), plus, I've added a feature for tweeting to twitter or denting to identi.ca (another microblog service, like twitter).
I'm looking into the facebook api to see about adding facebook status updates, as well.

Also, I've built install wizards for both Windows and Linux.

So...lots of progress has been made, and, yet, still more progress to come.

Additionally, I have created xpostulate for user support, development discussion, etc.

./tony

posted with Xpostulate

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DW barcodes

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:23:38 GMT

A long time ago (May 2003), adcott had a barcode maker that would generate barcodes based on a LiveJournal user's username and internal ID. (That barcode maker no longer exists.)

As part of my migration to Dreamwidth, I figured I should update the barcode icon that I had made based on that image to refer to Dreamwidth: the first four digits are now based on the ASCII codes of “DW” rather than those of “LJ”, and the remainder come from my Dreamwidth user ID rather than my LiveJournal one.

The barcode looks different since I don't have the font the original used. But the style I'm using has the advantage that the barcode fits into a LJ/DW icon; the original had the first and last plaintext digits outside the bars, making it wider than 100 pixels unless you chopped them off. (A disadvantage of the font is that wide letters such as 'm' or 'w' will be right next to the next letter, without a space in between.)

And, like the original, it should still be a valid UPC or EAN-13 barcode (the check-digit is calculated rather than being fixed).

Limitations: There’s only enough room for 14 letters at the top (actually, one pixel less than you'd need for 14), so if your username is longer than that, it'll get chopped off at the front and/or back.

While it's theoretically possible to embed the output of the barcode generator into a page with an “img” tag (it’s a plain 2-colour B/W 97×72 PNG image), I’d like to ask that you not hotlink the images like that, to spare my bandwidth. Instead, save them to your own webspace (or upload them as a Dreamwidth icon).

Uppercase/lowercase is ignored; however, images are cached by default and the generated image will use the capitalisation your first used. So if you request “ExampleUserName”, it’ll show you an image with that capitalisation even if you later ask for the barcode for “exampleusername” or even “exaMplEusERNamE”.

If it can’t find the username, then it’ll give you a barcode with all zeroes for the user ID number.

Since Dreamwidth communities URLs behave like journal ones, you can even create barcodes for them -- e.g. dw_nifty.

If you use the output of my barcode generator, I'd appreciate attribution: something like “created with pne’s barcode generator” would be fine. (Just out of courtesy and to make people aware of the tool; I imagine the output is public domain since there's basically no creativity involved that I could claim copyright over.) You can also add the URL: http://pne.mizinamo.org/dwbarcode. (Which I hope will remain stable, though I can’t promise it.)

Suggestions are welcome. (For example, I wonder whether black-on-white or black-on-transparent would be better? It's currently black-on-white, with a 1px white border.)

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eXpostulate (x-posting client)

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 19:25:13 GMT

Hi,

I'm posting to this community using eXpostulate, a cross-posting blog client that I've built in Tcl/Tk.

eXpostulate is pretty rudimentary, at most levels, but has some nifty features on others. I have plans to make more modifications, especially in specific reference to dreamwidth (need to modify insertion menu to include DW specific tags for cut, user, community, etc.), adding more entry fields for location, privacy, etc.

But the advantage that eXpostulate has is that one can write a post, then simply click 4 buttons and fire said post off to four different blog communities (livejournal, insanejournal, deadjournal & dreamwidth). Unlike other clients (logjam, for instance) the user need not login to service1, write post, send post, reload post, logout, login into service2, send post, reload post ...
Once the post is written, it can be x-posted to all four, and to as many relevant communities, with relative ease and efficiency.

eXpostulate

eXpostulate is "themable" (user may configure the colors of the interface), posts to 4 blogging services (soon to come, wordpress and blogger functions, as well, possibly more), and has some useful editing functions (will be adding more html tag insertion options soon, too).

It's probably not as co0l as catness's client, but then she is a more skilled hacker than I am, and she rocks. I'm learning (will be looking at her code, too)

./tonybaldwin

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