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on labelling 'new' comments! (crosspost from my DW)

Hello!

I don't know about you, but one of the few changes I actually did like in LJ was the handy 'new' comment things that popped up when you revisted a page. Fortunately, there is a way to implement them in DW and make them work in the same way. The steps I'm going to detail have been tried and tested in both Firefox and Chrome, and should work without much problems.

( ... )

(original comment here / DW post here)

Feed sub bookmarklet

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.

Six-degrees

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.

Current Mood: chipper

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openid

Your own domain as an OpenID in two lines*

I just set up OpenID at my woefully out-of-date but pithier URL of http://metawidget.net.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

I has found shortcut.

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?

Filter community posts by the user posting

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)

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

Current Mood: creative

Mood theme sharing

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)

Greasemonkey Instant Comment userscript

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.

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

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.

DW site skins

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!

LibraryThing widgets

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 )

Entry tags:

exploration

Some nifty resources!

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!

Entry tags:

(Almost) hiding feed content on your reading page

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

See this post on using CSS to make feed userpics and custom comment colors in

matgb's journal!

Entry tags:

user scripts

Zen Coding userscript

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.

Chrome Extension: Dreamwidth inbox new message notifier

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

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.)

Entry tags:

Declutter style=mine

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.

Importing your public entries to Facebook

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!