juliet | Entries tagged with dreamwidth

I've seen several people on my LJ FL moving to Dreamwidth in the last week or so (welcome!). Just a quick note that I've been crossposting from there (as juliet) for Some Time & will continue to do so. You can also comment over there with an LJ OpenID (see link at bottom of this post).

I have a stack of invite codes available, so comment if you also fancy migrating, or name-squatting, or whatever.

Dreamwidth has been having problems with people hassling them as a service (details, for obvious reasons, not released). PayPal, when contacting by the trolls, demanded that DW take down perfectly legal content. Instead of doing this, DW is sticking by their Guiding Principles & is in the process of switching merchant providers (not a trivial thing to do). Now, *this* is the sort of reaction I want to see from a journal service.

I've been crossposting (I love the automagic crossposter) for ages; at present I'm still hanging on for reading-page interoperability before I jump ship altogether, but I'll be letting my LJ paid account lapse soon. Partly because I like DW, and partly because the site is so much easier to use (& keeps getting better!).

I've got DW invites available if anyone wants to come over & try it out.

Just a quick note that I'm not adding many people to my DW reading list at present (until the filters are back, basically), because I know my own tendency to procrastination, and a long reading list is BAD BAD BAD. (Of course, this way I can still procrastinate by going to my circle page & clicking through directly to journals, but y'know. Takes more effort.)

I'm also mostly not adding people to my access list, because I don't yet know what I'm going to do with that. (Current exception being people I already know IRL.)

So, yeah, this probably does mean that every so often I'll have a big session of reading back on people's journals & leaving massively out-of-date comments :)

Current Location: cafe in Brisbane, Australia

As open beta comes up, & I optimistically hope that other people I already know might move over here from LJ, I am wondering whether I should stick with this username or return to julietk (which I am on LJ). That is, if switching one's username is even possible, which I don't know. But anyway! And while I'm at it, I'm trying to think of a fic username, pref one that (unlike my current one) isn't based on my real name. Suggestions welcome.

Poll #15 username

Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 1

which username?

juliet: early adopter cachet, & it is my name
1 (100.0%)

julietk: matches with username on LJ & most of the rest of interwebs; also my name
0 (0.0%)

Any fic username suggestions?

...which is terribly exciting, and which prompts me to go fix the DOB patch.

It has also just occurred to me that the glory of the wireless USB modem thingy is that I could go up to the roof and sit in the sunshine to do this.

Current Mood: excited

I've been doing a little (very little...) coding over the last couple of weeks for Dreamwidth, which went into closed beta at the weekend. (Which was/is very exciting!).

It's a code fork of Livejournal, but they're taking the opportunity afforded by starting up anew to rip out large chunks of code by the roots & rewrite things *better*. The biggest example (for me, anyway) of this being the replacement of the friends system by a system which explicitly separates "people I want to be able to read my stuff" from "people I want to read". For me, that's pretty much the Killer App right there. The increase on the comment limits from 4,300 char to 16,000 (there's a similar post size limit increase, but I've never hit the post limit so that bothers me, personally, less :) ) is also shiny. Plus: no ads. And one of the owners (

synecdochic) has discussed at length why ads on social content sites Do Not Work, financially speaking, so I believe that they actually mean this.

The meta-things that I'm impressed with:

- a commitment to openness (of business practices and site-running) and consultation that I believe in. Possibly in part because I've been involved with and/or witnessed discussions about proposals or ideas that have resulted in decisions being changed :)

- a diversity statement that doesn't read like corporate bullshit.

- the business plan is along the lines of "small, stable, functioning, ongoing business" rather than "let's flog it in due course & bathe in web2.0 cash". An interesting post on the subject of business aims & so forth.

So, yeah. I shan't be moving off LJ altogether unless/until various things change[0], but I'm certainly going to be doing a certain amount of moving across. I gather there is a crossposting tool, for starters. I'm very fond of LJ, but only in the sense of being fond of the things it enables me to do. DW feels like a project I can be fond of in a more specific sense, and I like that.

[0] The real Killer App would of course be full interoperability - i.e. being able to read one's LJ friends-list, even locked posts, on DW via OpenID. This is a Difficult Technical Problem for which there is at present no decent fix, but it is being contemplated. Full import of your own LJ will be in place before open beta; OpenID already allows cross-site reading & commenting on non-FL posts.