Dreamwidth: The Nifty Things You Might Not Know

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.

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(original comment here / DW post here)

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:
javascript:void(location.href='http://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/?url='+escape(location.href)) 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.

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.

I just set up OpenID at my woefully out-of-date but pithier URL of http://metawidget.net.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