Newcomers to Dreamwidth

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 )

( Edit Community Profile )

( Customize Community Appearance )

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.

I've covered What to post about on Dreamwidth, but now that I think of it, that may have been putting the cart before the horse! That sort of thing is good to know, but harder to do if you don't know how to post on Dreamwidth.

When it comes to actually posting, you'll want to pick a text format to use. I personally use Casual HTML, since it's what I was used to on LiveJournal before Dreamwidth, but I know a lot of Tumblr users are going to be more familiar with Rich Text Entry (RTE); if you want to know more about the RTE options, teres wrote a great breakdown right over here. To find out what HTML you can use on Dreamwidth, check out this FAQ page.

Once you have that done, the first thing I'm going to recommend you do is to turn on the Beta "Create Entries" page. Why? Because Dreamwidth is going to make it the default sometime soon, and it'll be better to get used to it sooner rather than later. Also, it's just superior to the original Create Entries page in a lot of ways! I'll go into more detail on that in a moment.

To turn on the Beta "Create Entries" page, first go to the Organize tab. At the bottom of the drop-down menu is the option, "Test Beta Features". On that page, you have the ability to opt in to helping test five different beta features. At the top of that list is the Beta Create Entries page. Click to Opt In on that, and you should be good to go! (I also recommend opting in on the beta Inbox page.)

Now comes some of the fun: If you go visit the Create Entries page now, you'll notice some different features. At the very top, right above the subject line, is the option "Rearrange Panels". Surprise! You can now decide, with some limitations, how you want the Create Entry page to look!

(With thanks to teres for the reminder: There are some animations built into this process; if you want those to go away or to be minimized, that is the final option to click in the Rearrange Panels field.)

( Let's get into the nitty gritty of that )

One field that won't move is the field where you select whether to post and what privacy level to post at; you can find it right below the text entry field. There you will find one or two drop-down menus. The first menu will allow you to choose the privacy level of the post, be it public (anyone can read it), access-locked (only people you grant access to can read it), access-locked to a specific subset of your access list (a custom access filter), or private (only you can read it).

The second drop-down menu is for whether you're posting to your own journal or to any communities you may be a member of that allow you to post. The default option from both the "Create: Post Entry" drop-down and the "Post" option on the left-hand side of the navigation strip at the top of various Dreamwidth pages is to your own journal, but if you are visiting a community and click the "Post" option on the right-hand side of the navigation strip, it will select that community for you instead. If you post using that method, you will not have a drop-down menu to choose another location from.

And those are the basics of the beta Create Entries page! If I missed anything, or if you have any questions, please feel free to comment and let me know, and I'll do my best to clear things up.

Edit: Shoot, I forgot to talk about cut tags. Next post, maybe?

Edit 2: With thanks to teres for suggestions to make this post better!

(Originally posted on Tumblr where I was blatantly showing off and bragging.)

So what exactly is a "mood theme", anyway?

A mood theme is like a sticker you add to the end of your posts to indicate what mood you’re in. If you've seen the cute little cartoon-ish rats at the bottom of my posts, those are part of the mood theme that I use!

In the "Currents" section of the post creation page, there’s a drop-down menu with 132 moods to pick from, as well as a space to enter a custom mood. If you pick a mood from the drop-down menu, it will upload one of the aforementioned stickers on your post. If you enter text as a custom mood instead of using the drop-down menu, there will be no sticker. But, if you do both, you can get a sticker and have it display a custom mood name for you!

For example, if you pick "happy" from the drop-down menu, you can enter "pleased as punch" in the custom mood field, and your post will say that next to the sticker instead of "happy" (demonstrated below). It can be a fun alternative to talking in the tags, since tags are strictly functional/organizational on Dreamwidth.

Got it. Now, how do I pick or change my mood theme on Dreamwidth?

First, make sure you’re logged in. You can’t change anything about your account if you’re not 😉

Second, go to the Customize Journal Style page. You can find it under the drop-down menu of the Organize tab. Once there, click the "Display" option. The ability to pick your mood theme should be at the top of the "Customize your theme" section. Or, for a shortcut, click this link!

Third, pick the mood theme you want from the drop-down menu. If you want to preview all of the mood themes before picking one, you can do so here. (It’s also linked right above the mood theme selection menu.) To view all of the mood images at once, find a mood theme you're interested in, then click the "View All" option on the right-hand side of it. Dreamwidth currently has two pages worth of free mood themes to pick from, so be sure to check them all out to find the one you like best! After you're done looking at the options, return to the journal customization page.

Finally, select the mood theme you want to use from the drop-down menu. A preview of the mood theme will pop up on the right, if you're worried about remembering which mood theme is which. After you’ve selected the mood theme you want to use, click the Save button at the bottom of the box. And you should be good to go!

Enjoy your fun new mood theme 😃

Okay, that’s cool and all, but I’ve seen accounts that have Star Trek or Pokémon mood themes. How do I get one of those?

Well, I’ve got good news and bad news there.

The good news is, anyone can get or make one of their own! In fact, I’ve set up a Dreamwith community for anyone who wants to make their own custom mood theme and wants some structure or friendly encouragement as they go: you can find it at moodthemeinayear. Some people also have also made custom mood themes that they’re willing to share with the public, be they fandom or original. In fact, that’s what I was originally planning to do with my Fancy Rats and Jellyfish, before I learned how to submit them to be official site-supported themes!

The bad news is twofold: First, you need a paid account to set up a custom mood theme to use. As long as you get your custom mood theme set up and ready to go while you have paid time, you can keep using it after your paid time runs out, but only if your paid time runs out while you have it selected as your mood theme, and you cannot edit it without getting more paid time. This is fine if you can easily afford paid time, even just a month’s worth, or are enough in love with a custom mood theme that you don’t think you’ll be changing it any time soon, but is definitely a barrier! (I daydream about offering paid time to users who complete certain custom mood theme milestones at the community I linked above, but am not in that financial position at this time, alas.)

The second part is that it takes a fair amount of effort to set up a custom mood theme. Even if someone else made all of the images, you still have to upload them somewhere (Dreamwidth has image hosting, though it can be confusing to newcomers; Squidge.org is also an option I've heard) and match the image links in the custom mood theme setup and editing page. You need a minimum of 15 unique images for a "complete" mood theme, unless you want to use the same image for every mood.

That said, it can be done, and it can also be very rewarding! I had a blast making the mood themes shown above. Also, if the custom mood theme you create is entirely original art (no fanart, no screencaps from your favorite shows, basically nothing Dreamwidth can be sued over for copyright infringement), you can submit it to be a site-supported mood theme, which makes it available to all Dreamwidth users of all account types, free accounts definitely included! So depending on what you make, there’s a bit of a loophole to the "needing a paid account" thing 😉

I don't currently have a tutorial for uploading a custom mood theme, but I have added it to my to-do list.

Anyway, that’s the basics of Dreamwidth and mood themes! I hope that answers any questions you might have, but I’ll do my best to help if you have any others 💖

There's a number of technological and cultural shifts Tumblr users will have to make when switching to Dreamwidth; the differences in image hosting are probably the biggest technological switch, but the one I anticipate giving people the most trouble is tagging.

On Tumblr, you can add pretty much whatever you want to the tags, in any order you want; there is no limit to them, and they're essentially used as a secondary comment system.

Not so for Dreamwidth! Dreamwidth has a hard limit on the number of tags any journal or community can register; it's 1,000 for free users, 1,500 for basic paid accounts, and 2,000 for premium paid accounts, and they're basically entirely for organizational purposes. One of the ways that Dreamwidth's code reflects this is that it lists tags alphabetically in posts, not in the order that they were written or added. If you want to include a stream of consciousness in your tags and have them make sense, your best bet is to find a way to make them alphabetical. There's also a hard limit of 40 characters per tag for everyone, regardless of account type (paid vs free).

There are other organizational options, Memories chief among them, but it's not really possible to opt out of tags being organizational and switch them to being communication. So what, if anything, can you do instead?

( Option One: Icons )

( Option Two: Titles and cut text )

( Option three: Currents )

( Other options: Tiny text and comment editing )

So there you have it! Dreamwidth may not have "talking in the tags" the way Tumblr does, but it does have some other forms of communication that you can still have fun with.