Newcomers to Dreamwidth

It's me again! With how-tos on more cool DW features. (I think they're cool.)

Comment Tracking:

My personal favorite--I consider it the secret sauce of Dreamwidth (and LJ before it)--post tracking! You can use this to get notified when your favorite bloggers make new posts. But you can also CRUCIALLY use it to get notified when people leave new comments on a post you like.

So if you got dug in on a cool conversation in the comments, you can turn that on and get notifications whenever somebody leaves another reply. This lets you stay in the conversation without keeping the post open in a browser window or something. You can add a blog or post to your tracking at any time using the little bell/track this icon at the bottom of each post. You can manage your post tracking in Account Settings > Notification tab. (Also the place to go to adjust your notification settings generally.)

Create Custom Access Circles & Custom Reading Pages:

Another super useful trick, if you're somebody who likes privacy and the ability to lock your posts to certain users, is the ability to create custom access circles. On DW, you always have the ability to set posts to public, private or 'access locked' (this means people you have followed/friended). But you can also create custom access lists! So perhaps you have one for 'besties I trust with information about my mental health.' Or one for 'beta readers for my rough drafts' or 'people who opted into my obsessive posting about kpop.' You create and manage these Custom Access Groups or Custom Circles in your Account Settings > Manage Circles. Create and name one, and then add the people you want in it. Or remove people who you've blog-divorced.

As a bonus, a Circle also includes a custom reading page. So along with using them for custom blog post access, you can also use them to create specialty reading pages--maybe 'people who write weird fic,' or 'my fiber arts friends.' AND you can set those reading pages to be public or private, so that if you don't want people to know you have a weird fic reading page, you can hide it.

Subscribing to RSS feeds or, Did you know you can follow Tumblr blogs from your DW reading page?

Another super cool one: You can add RSS feeds to your Dreamwidth reading page. So you can follow people who post on Tumblr or Twitter or Bluesky. You can follow people's personal off-site blogs. You can follow news feeds from various sites--maybe you're into AP's Finance section or you want to be able to track new fics posted to your favorite AO3 fandoms. Here's the how-to of creating and following RSS/Atom feeds on your Dreamwidth. (Edit: now with 100% more actual link!)

Post to Dreamwidth via email

In your Account Settings > Mobile, you can set up the ability to send emails to Dreamwidth to make posts or reply to comments. Nice if you don't feel like logging in. If you're like me and you lurk in your email a lot, you can have DW notifications set to send you emails as post or comment notifications and then reply to them straight from email.

Crossposted to newcomers, pillowfolks

Tagging posts

On DW, post tagging works differently than more modern platforms. Here, your tag archive is easily accessible to you and others, and manageable. Check out my list. (I made those nested ones by using tags fandom: wod and fandom: temeraire--the system understands that's actually two nested tags.)

You can even display them as a widget in your blog's sidebar, like I did on mine: prettyarbitrary.

The post creation module also makes it very easy to review and select the tags you want to apply to any given post. So if you have categories you want to keep organized, such as 'my art' or 'my fic' or 'book recs,' apply them consistently and you can end up with a premade library. Which, yes, you can link to. Here's my 'dreamwidth' tag.

How to @ a user or community

<user name=blog-name>

Shows like e.g. pillowfolks. The user or community you link to this way will not get a notification they've been mentioned. But it does make their name linkable.

How to do that text box thing I just did

<textarea also optionally cols="45" rows="5"> Handy for showing the code you're trying to demonstrate. cols sets a desired display width of the box. It counts in the number of characters from left to right, so this will show 45 characters before you have to scroll. rows sets a desired display height. It counts the number of lines from the top, so this would force it to show five rows before you have to scroll.


How to make linkable text

Most platforms make this easy to do these days, but hey, just in case you want to do it by hand and you don't know how:

Here I'm linking to <a href="url of the post or site or whatever">The text I want to be visible</a>.

And it shows like this: Here I'm linking to The text I want to be visible.

How to add a read-more cut

Part of the post you want automatically displayed. <cut text="Your cut will look like this"> Stuff under the cut. </cut> And you can even have stuff after the cut, if you want.

And here's how it comes out.

( Your cut will look like this )

( In fact, you can have multiple cuts in a single post, if desired! )

Note that this does automatically start the cut-text on a new line. If you want to hide or black out a spoiler or potentially triggering text in the middle of a paragraph, it doesn't work well for that purpose.

How to embed an image in your post

Perhaps it's surrounded by blog post text. <img src="https://site.com/url-in-quotation-marks-here.jpg or maybe .png or .gif or whatever" width="600px or whatever width you want to set"> You can keep typing below this, too.

How to embed a clickable image in your post

Blog post text above, if you want. <a href="url where people can see the full-sized image"><img src="https://site.com/url-in-quotation-marks-here.jpg" width="600px or whatever width you want to set"></a> More blog post text below, if you want.

Crossposted to pillowfolks getting_started