I'm having a weird issue. In my DW comments, unexpanded comments are jumping in font size and I can't tell what the heck happened.

( screenshot below cut )

I checked my stylesheet and DW functions but can't work out why it jumps in size.

Or for that matter, why it has 'no subject' there and for that matter in regular font.

I will happily owe a favor to anyone who can help me work out where it all went wrong.

Okay, this is a request for someone who knows DW's system and CSS; I am trying to update my layers and oh God it's a work in progress and i cannot find out how I moved my top links to the right.

This is, I admit, my own fault.

When I first got my DW, I went crazy with creating my own base layer for all pages, but that was when I was still doing CSS regularly. I am so rusty. I used the new core to create a new base with the same elements, but my own code is kind of screwing me because creating functions is fun for me. Even though I think some aren't needed anymore, I literally went through and customized each page and this is like coding hell.

If anyone wants to look at it and help, I'd appreciate it so much. It's what I put up now, because nothing will inspire me to actually work on it as being annoyed every time I look at my DW and see something wrong.

Also! If anyone sees problems when reading/commenting, tell me!

Hi new DWers/returning DWers!

If you are new and baffled, or been away so long it's like you're new and also baffled, you're probably wondering what the hell you're looking at and what it does. I am a native LJ/DW and will try not to confuse the fuck out of you but it's also been a while, so anyone want to correct me or clarify something I made sound incredibly byzantine, feel free.

Let's talk about your posts:

Same

Your posts are just that--you're posting words to your journal. Just like in Tumblr; it shows up on your journal home page, your reading list, and on the reading lists of those who are following you.

You can tag it with personal tags, and no, shitpost tagging is not a thing though you can if you want? But unlike Tumblr, you can use the tagging system of your DW to actually organize your own journal and find shit, like that post you did on that thing like two years ago and had cats?????

Different

You have options.

At the bottom of your post is a lot of stuff; tags, mood, location, whatever. Then there's "Show this entry to" and here you can choose who sees what you write.

Options:
- Everyone - this is public. Anyone can see this post anywhere.
- Access List - everyone you have granted Access to your posts can read this. We used to call this 'friendslocked' in LJ. The next section will explain this.
- Private - just you.
- Custom - this is where it gets fun. You can create subgroups of those you granted access for posts only they can see. See next section.

Posting Summary

Posting to your journal with "Show this entry to Everyone" is public. Anyone can see this.
Posting to your journal with "Show this entry to Private" is private to YOU. Only YOU can see it.
Posting to your journal with "Show this entry to Access List" is restricted to PEOPLE YOU GIVE ACCESS TO. Only people on your ACCESS LIST can see it.
Posting to your journal with "Show this entry to Custom Filter" is restricted to people both in your ACCESS LIST and also in a custom group you can create.

Let's talk about your circle, friends, and follows.

Same

Your Circle is who you follow aka want to read. When you add someone to your Circle, you are saying "I like this person's thoughts and want to read them." So like a Tumblr follow. They appear on your reading list (tumblr: dashboard). We're good? Awesome.

Different (ish)

Your Circle is your reading list; this is how you control who you read.

Access List is how you control who can read your posts.

Granting Access: granting access means you are explicitly letting someone have access to your locked posts. At the bottom of your Post page, "Show this entry to: Access List". Anything you want to limit access to, this is how it's done.

You can also create custom groups out of your Access List, giving certain people access to access-locked posts but not others.

Summary

Add to Circle - Who I want to read
Add to Access List - Who I want to read MY access-locked posts.
Add to Access List in a Custom Group - Subgroup of my Access List who can read my Subgroup-locked posts.

Let's talk about images and art

DW does have native image hosting. kore talks about it here in comments.

Also of Interest

Network - PAID FEATURE - You'll see something called "Network" - that page contains all the public posts of the friends of your friends aka, the people who belong to the Circles of those in your Circle.

...seriously, just call it friends of friends.

Search - PAID FEATURE - okay, I get it's not perfect but IT ACTUALLY WORKS AND YOU CAN FIND SHIT. Search here.

Inbox - no, this is actually useful. For [insert reason], you want to see all the comments you've gotten on any post? You want to see who added you to their Circle? You want to check your IM's Your inbox: you can see it all or use those links to break it down a little.


Conclusion

You'll notice one word I use a lot up there: control. That's the biggest difference between tumblr/twitter and DW/LJ.

DW/LJ give control of content to the creator; you choose exactly who sees what you post. You can edit it, delete it, whatever you want; your content never leaves your control and cannot be edited/changed by someone else. Someone could copypaste the entire post to their own journal, change it, and post it, but your original is still under your control.

DW/LJ give control of comments to the owner of the journal. You can disable comments on your posts, screen them, delete them.

Me

Okay, it's possible I wrote this for myself to make sure I remember everything. Did I miss anything important?

Note: this is being updated and clarified in progress.

More Reading:

This will be for links to comments or posts on DWness. Some of this stuff I didn't even know or forgot so feel free to link me.

kore How to filter by tags for people on your feed. Kore's been all over my comments with some fantastic advice and info, btw.

independence1776 has a fantastic master post of links here. So. Many. Beautiful. Links.

Note to self:

Next time you write up your custom style with some truly--unusual--properties, plz to be leaving notes to yourself on what some of this stuff is supposed to do and where it goes and for that matter, why you randomly added a margin 2 em on which the entire page seems to hinge though you cannot figure out a.) why you did that or b.) how you did that.

And you know what else wouldn't hurt? When you demanded all your modules follow the same format and had to do an exception for one of them because of an image, maybe note where that is?

I'm going to have to start from scratch and it will make me cry, I can feel it. Argh.

Two weeks. You will have time to do actually work on this in two weeks.

Adventures in layouts:

I changed mine! It does not work in IE very well. I will--rage about that later. And Im almost done with another one for a friend that acts like it's working, but I am wary.

The new layout is open to taking if anyone particularly wants it, but it has a couple of bugs, and the CSS is still a mess that I haven't cleaned up, being involved in a face-off with the horizontal calendar. It's set to public if anyone wants to look at the code or use any of it. I'm also still not sure of the hover-background color change--it was neat to do! But not so neat to use. I don't know. I'm torn.

This is where I realized what the user level was for. Seriously, I am so getting into that.

Adventures with documentation:

I haven't added much to the wiki, as it takes forever to code it into readability, but doing the preliminary work in Notetab and adding a bit every time I go in to play with the core functions and properties and sometimes, I almost think I understand! Then I realize I don't.

It's somewhat lowering and yet exciting I am still falling over things that make no sense to me.

( a question of properties, and here be new functions )

So maybe once a day (or so), I google Dreamwidth for basically two reasons: a.) to enjoy people's squee and b.) to be amused by the non-squee. In between a squee and a misconception-rife non-squee, I ran across this.

Ada Lovelace Day: Two ground-breaking open source projects by Kirrily Robert in her blog Infotrope and discovered something I hadn't thought to wonder about.

But to the best of my knowledge, there are only two open source projects in the world which a) have a significant number of developers, and b) are majority female. They are An Archive Of Our Own (a project of the Organization for Transformative Works) and Dreamwidth.

She also adds, near the end of the article:

And, to fulfil the requirements of the Ada Lovelace Day Pledge, the two women I admire in technology are:

Naomi Novik, chair of the OTW’s Board of Directors and inaugural chair of its ADT committee (developers of the Archive). You might also know her as author of the Temeraire series.

Denise Paolucci, co-founder, project/product manager, and loudest advocate and enthusiast for Dreamwidth.

These two between them have been instrumental in bringing hundreds of other women into open source software, and I admire them immensely.

My knowledge on this subject is limited, but assuming this is true, I think I should say this.

My admiration is a given, but I'd also liked to add my thanks and my apologies both. See, I knew what you were doing was extraordinary. But I didn't know that you had changed the world.

That's very, very cool. Thank you.

The thing about the new Core2 style is--this is so much fun to modify. It is.

However, I am going to destroy worlds or possibly pick up a small but terribly inconvenient addiction to sniffing paint thinner if I cannot figure out how to override my damn comment layout.

I tried to use the function I modified from negatives--no go. That literally killed the page horribly like a drunken girlfriend near leather seats. Is anyone out there using the new core and has modified theirs successfully, or heck, tell me why when I use my own classes, it suicides messily and unreadably?

Anyone who can also tell me how to get previous out of the middle of my page summary will be given eternal devotion as well.

And lets see if making sure my username and not my email is in the username slot.

ETA: And that worked!

ETA 2: And crossposts edits as well, it seems.

I don't know if anyone would be all that interested at this date, but I did a few meta posts in 2003 right after I came to LJ (Novmeber 2002) about the transition between mailing lists and LJ (and in fact, I was usenet in 1999, so I was in the last three major jumps). For some people who have expereinced fandom only as LJ, I think this entire thing may be kind of bizarre and a little frightening, which yes, it is. I transitioned usenet-onenet-egroups-yahoogroups-diaryland-livejournal and away from archives, though I've always had a webpage. Every time there was a major change, it was disconcerting and confusing.

( links, fandom, changes, etc )

If anyone else has any posts on fandom migration, or changes in fandom between mediums, etc, please, please, please link in comments, especially those of you who wrote them, and I'll add them at the end of this post.

Crosspost to Dreamwidth.

On Being a Dreamwidth Optimist and on Commenting by the_shoshanna, mirrored on LJ here, is an essay regarding Dreamwidth, Denise and Mark (the owners), and why as former LJ Abuse members they should be trusted after all the problems with LJ abuse. If you are wary about Dreamwidth or the owners, or wondering what the fuss is about, I'd recommend reading it and the comments.

I'm going to stop here and say, her essay is better, clearer, extremely informative, and objective as hell. I am objective one hour out of every week, and it is not that hour. If htere's one post you read about Dreamwidth, read hers.

That said, I never miss an opportunity to write at length about something if I have a laptop and free time and tea, and look at that, I have all three.

( dreamwidth and denise )

And finally, for the fannish people on my flist.

There were zines, and usenet, and mailing lists, and messageboards, and diaryland, and then livejournal. We're not static; we're bad at standing still. I've been in fandom ten years this summer, and seven years in LJ as of last November. We've been here for a while, and it's been--great, and terrible, and fascinating. We've never been afraid to try everything once, and sometimes everything a few times. It's kind of what we do. We like things that are new.

Or hey, I'll say this:

Be a lemming. Jump blind over the cliff because your friends are doing it. Sure, the jump is scary, and you can't work out why the hell they thought this was a good idea, but the rush is unbelievable. You'll love what you find on the other side.

Open beta starts April 30th. Try it.

...and to point out, I started writing this an hour ago and just realized I've written shorter fic. Jesus.

References

Dreamwidth Wiki - all you ever wanted to know as of now.

So after years of having no clue what the hell s2 was all about, forty-five seconds in cimorene's dwj and lo and behold, I finally understand the structure!

(And also because strangely enough, if you take programming courses, suddenly things look familiar when you lose your sense of eternal bitterness at lj. Which you know. There you go.)

However, I have a question. While working on a new style, the replyto page now loses the bottom half of each sentence. All other forms look fine, but that is just weird. And it only seems to apply--in limited experience--to things involving cut-tags. It doesn't occur when I open it at the cut-tag, or open it from comments link, or open it as html, or anything but the reply open.

Anyone have insight on why that one particular lost grammatical integrity?

I forgot this is fun. *wistful*

( trying to put the reply code here )

svmadelyn offered me a Dreamwidth code, so, I'm here, and haven't really, um, done anything with it yet? You have to understand, I am really weird about change. I'll start crossposting as soon as I am not staring at it with wide, terrified eyes muttering something like "God, kids today", as one does when one is confronted with change. People, I still miss grunge and buy flannel shirts in vain hope. This is not a new thing.

However, there is an entire entry on the creation of new s2 documentation, so I can say honestly that while I am not quite having a code related orgasm, it's very close, as I have wanted ot change to that forever and drove myself crazy not being able to do so because I did not understand how to customize it myself.

Also, some of you found me already--hey! That was fast!

Other News

Went to have my hair cut and whatnot for V's wedding thsi weekend, and it's never a good sign when one's hairdresser frowns three times. What is usually a quick color and cut was five hours between various dryers, two different careful washes, coloring, and cutting. V chose the color, because later, I will use this great act of sacrifice for personal gain ("I am the best maid of honor ever. I color coordinated my hair for you, bitch. Babysit my son tonight while I wrote porn."), and also, she, unlike me, is not functionally fashion color-blind and knows which red looks best. It is indeed very red, with the upper--layer thing coppery. Afterward, I lost between four to six inches, but to my surprise, it's still well below my shoulders, along with a frantic deep conditioning (apparently, I am hard on my hair, and I have never been looked at with such reproach), and temporary straightening.

[The thing is, I don't have my hair down like, ever anymore. Baby Niece and Baby Nephew are brutal, and at work, I don't like to give people the expectation I'll ever make any effort at my appearance, but instead, they learn to treat the days I come in looking well-groomed as the treat for them it is. So it's a surprise. And it's also growing faster, it seems, along with the problem I've been having with my fingernails needing attention far too often for someone who doesn't like to pay attention to that sort of thing. Yay thyroid medication? I guess?]

To those who have naturally straight hair, it's very hard to describe the sheer bliss of twenty-four to forty-eight hours where your hair does not a.) tangle when you breathe, b.) tangle when you don't breathe or c.) tangle when the gods tell it to, which is all the time. And it swings. And it is pretty. And my niece, who has very, very straight hair, seriously loves it.

My son keeps looking at me askance, like he's never seen such a creature. That totally would have made it worth it anyway.

Recs

Short one, because I didn't organize my log this week with the labels.

By Strength and By Virtue by casspeach, Merlin/Arthur - somewhat angsty, dark, and surprisingly satisfying story of rusalkas and revenge. And a fantastic ending.

ETA: To clarify on dreamwidth, nothing will appear there that isn't here as well. Status quo continues. This also reminds me--I seriously, seriously need to update my webpage.