Personal Communities: Dreamwidth's "Side Blogs"

[soc_puppet]

Side blogs are a feature of Tumblr that are beloved by many: A secondary blog that you can post to without signing out of your primary blog. Most people use this secondary account to blog about and reblog things related to an interest they consider too "niche" for their main account, specific fandom content being among the main contenders. Other Tumblr users can subscribe to/follow specifically that side account, and while Tumblr recently added the ability for side blogs to respond to comments under the name of the account that is commented on, the side blogs themselves cannot subscribe to/follow anyone.

That's not quite a thing on Dreamwidth. One alternate option would be to create an entire separate journal account; Dreamwidth Roleplayers do this a lot, and may even be able to direct you to widgets that can help you switch between accounts quickly. But this is about the same as creating a separate Tumblr account, and not so much as creating a side account.

Something that might come closer is creating a personal community: A community that only one person can post to.

If you've been nosing around newcomers or the_great_tumblr_purge for a while, you probably have some idea of how communities work on Dreamwidth. Tumblr is, in fact, currently implementing a similar feature, so you may be familiar with the idea from there, as well (though last I knew it was still in beta).

Creating a community of any kind should start in a similar way to creating a personal account; unlike creating a new journal, however, it can be done while you are logged in: Go to the "Create" tab and scroll to the bottom to Create Community. There, you will be prompted to name and title your community. As an example for this post, I am currently creating a community named example_comm, whose title is, "An example community for demonstration's sake".

You will then be prompted to pick how open you want community membership to be: open (anyone can freely join), moderated (anyone can ask to join, must be approved by an administrator), or by invitation only (only people invited by an administrator may join). This does not affect whether people are able to subscribe to a community, only whether they can post. I'm selecting "By invitation only", because this community is only for an example, but you can pick whichever you like.

Some things to keep in mind when picking your preference: Anyone who joins a community will be able to see posts locked to that community; if you want to have a side blog that only a certain subset of people can see the posts of, they will need to be members of the community. If you've ever wanted to have control of who follows your side account before they click the follow button, go with "moderated" or "by invitation only". If you don't have a preference to who joins, go with "open". If you don't plan to make any locked posts that only your community members will see, pick "by invitation only".

The next steps are to edit the community settings, edit the community profile, and customize community appearance.

Edit Community Settings:

You can adjust a community's settings in the Account Settings page, just as you can with your own journal account. While Dreamwidth will automatically link you to your new community's Account Settings once you create it, if you want to change your community's settings in the future, you'll need to go to Account Settings, the first listing under the Organize tab. There, you will see a drop-down menu listing all accounts you are a in charge of: Your own journal at the top, and any communities you are a moderator for listed alphabetically after.

The Account Settings for your new community will be automatically open to the Community tab. Here, you can change how people are allowed to join the community and who has posting access. If you selected "by invitation only" for your membership option, select either "All members" or "Select members" from the Posting Access field, right beneath the Membership field. If you selected either "Open" or "Moderated" for Membership options, pick "Select Members Only". If you pick "Select Members Only", a new check box option will appear: "New Member Posting". Checking that box will allow new community members to post to the community upon joining. If you are trying to create an actual community, this is fine; if you are trying to recreate the feel of a side account that only you can post to, do not check this box.

The next two check boxes are "Entry Moderation" and "Links After Join". If you're allowing other people to join your community, you may choose to check the Entry Moderation box; this means that every post made to the community will have to be approved by the community moderator (you), so no posts by other people should be able to be made without your go-ahead. Do not check "Links After Join". Upon joining a new community, new members who have posting access can be prompted to post to that community right then and there; since you are not allowing anyone else to post to the community, there's no reason to include a link for them to do so upon joining.

If you're not allowing anyone else to join your community, both of these should be moot point.

You shouldn't have to worry about the final options, Posting Guidelines, at all, since you're not allowing anyone else to post.


Edit Community Profile:

Filling out a community profile should be pretty similar to filling out a journal profile. You start by (optionally) uploading an icon for the community, optionally entering your location and date of birth (since a community isn't itself a person, you shouldn't need to worry about birth year), and optional outside web address (such as an AO3 account if you're making a fannish side blog).

From there, include a brief description of your community side blog in the Bio. The description I wrote for example_comm is as follows:

An example community created for the purposes of writing a walkthrough tutorial. This community is modeled after Tumblr's "sideblog accounts", with the idea that only the community owner can post to it, but anyone can subscribe to the community itself. You can learn about your other options for creating a mock sideblog in a post that will go up within a few hours.

(That post I'm referencing is this one I'm working on right now.)

An example bio for a proper side blog might be along the lines of:

Hello! Welcome to soc_puppet's [fandom] side blog, where Socchan shares all of eir thoughts on [fandom]. If you're interested in that, feel free to subscribe and come along for the ride!

Following that, list some of the interests relevant to the community in the "Interests" section. Some ideas would be the fandom the side blog is dedicated to and some of the content you anticipate posting about, such as specific ships, characters, or tropes.

It is up to you whether you want to have your subscriber list on display or not.

Once you're done, hit the Save button at the bottom of the page. You'll be able to edit any of the profile fields in the future by visiting the community's profile page; simply scroll to the relevant section, and you should find an Edit link next to it.


Customize Community Appearance:

The final link will take you to the area where you can change how your new community looks. This, I'm afraid, is not my area of expertise; I'm afraid that the most I tend to do is pick a different site-supported theme and my preferred column layout, and then go about my day. However, there are lots of other things you can do to customize your new community!

If you want to learn more about customizing your journal or community theme, I recommend checking out style_system or dw_styles.

One thing I do know is that, once you've selected your theme and layout, you can move onto further customization, including which mood theme you might want to use for your community. Yes, your community can have a different mood theme from your journal! It should be possible to even create a custom mood theme for your community, though you will still need a paid account for that.


And that should do the trick! If you have any questions, if I've missed anything, or anything else, please feel free to comment and I'll do my best to help.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>One alternate option would be to create an entire separate journal account; Dreamwidth Roleplayers do this a lot,<<

It's also very common for creative people to have a separate blog (or "community" that only they can post to) just for their art, fiction, or whatever. Some fanwriters use different blogs to separate their fandoms when they're writing a ton of stuff.

Re: Thoughts

[soc_puppet]

Very true! I wonder if I can shoehorn that information into this post somewhere...

[cyare]

I never thought about using a comm as an equivalent of tumblr's sideblogs, that's smart! ^_^

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Lots of people set up a comm to post their art or fiction, because they like the features better than the ones for a blog -- they're a little different.