Dreamwidth: The Nifty Things You Might Not Know

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!

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* ;-)

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

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.

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

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.)

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.

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!