The Mandelbear's Musings

I started this DreamWidth account twelve years ago today in 2010. (I started my LJ account in June of 2002, so there will be another blogiversary coming up in a couple of months.) I believe I started cross-posting around then, although for a while I continued doing quick posts on LJ for things like birthdays. Eventually I imported all of my LJ posts, so DreamWidth is the authoritative copy now.

By 2010 I had already been using ljupdate, an Emacs-based LJ client, for a couple of years; I started working on my current emacs/make/git system in late 2015 when DW switched to HTTPS and ljupdate stopped working. For all I know it might have been fixed by now, but I like my hack better. (You can find it in MakeStuff/blogging/ on GitHub; it's acquired a few features since I wrote the README. I should fix that. Real Soon Now(TM).)

Another thing I need to do RSN is fix the links in imported posts that still point back to other posts in LJ, and add "imported-from" links to the posts that don't have "crossposted-to" links.

I will refrain from boring you with statistics. In part that's because I don't have everything archived in one place. Yet. That's another thing I've been meaning to do for several years now. (The reason for things being scattered is another thing I won't bore you with. In this post.) And besides, I just found a problem with my word-counting program.

I don't really expect that many Tumblr refugees will see this post, even with the tag, but I know there's at least one person already on my reading list who cross-posts from there, so there may be a few. There may be some G+ refugees, too. In reality, all I'm doing is taking advantage of the occasion to post a few links. Hopefully more than just a handful of my readers will find them interesting.

Let's start with the useful stuff. (People who have been on DW long enough to remember the Livejournal exodus will probably want to skip ahead to the fascinating stuff.)

We can start with the DW community post_tumblr_fandom and ilyena_sylph's About tumblr and DW, mostly news post answers. Good overviews. Another great summary is staranise | Basic Dreamwidth for Tumblr users. (Which comes by way of umadoshi | More using/getting-to-know-Dreamwidth, fandom-migration, and WTF-Tumblr links.)

That's probably enough to get most people started. On my personal reading list, the posts I've seen lately are:

• denise's announcement on dw_news | Welcome to Dreamwidth, Tumblr folks! -- this, or rather the notification in my email, was how I first learned about this debacle. With the new update to Tumblr's community guidelines announcing that they will no longer permit adult content on their site, we'd like to take a moment to reassure all y'all that we have your backs.
• From siderea | [dw] Welcome, G+ and Tumblr Refugees!, which links to Welcome Back to Social Journaling (basically how to get the most out of DW) and The Recipe, Or What you don't know about LJ/DW (on how to build and hold an audience).
• From kyburg, a crosspost from Tumblr, ironically, of Arkady Cosplay — From someone who’s survived MySpace, livejournal,... deviantart, and fanfiction.nets’ content purges and bad policy updates, here’s some advice on how to get through tumblr’s recent bullshit... (Good advice about how to leave gracefully.)
• From madfilkentist, a post comparing Dreamwidth vs. Facebook and Tumblr.
• ... and my own post from the (most recent) LJ exodus, PSA: LJBF: Goodbye's too good a word.... (I note that I still haven't carried out the full plan there -- I'm still cross-posting. I'll probably continue to, since there are still some people who only have accounts there. I'm sure the same thing will happen with Tumblr.)

Okay, now the fascinating stuff. Watch out for rabbit holes.

Let's start with jesse_the_k's post, Remember when Fandom Spec'ed Pinboard?. Well, no, I don't -- I wasn't using Delicious at the time. But apparently a lot of fans were, so when the site's owners (Yahoo) made some "improvements" like disallowing several punctuation characters in tags (in particular, "/" -- just try tagging fanfic without slash), there was a mass exodus to Pinboard.

Jesse links to Fan Is A Tool-Using Animal, which tells the whole story very entertainingly. It's a transcript of a talk given at dConstruct 2013 by Maciej Cegłowski. The talk included a reading from this hilarious bit of fanfic and, more relevant to our current topic, this amazing collaborative Google doc which is a list of features (with votes and use cases) that fans wanted for Pinboard.

So, finally getting back to Tumblr, (remember Tumblr? this is a post about Tumblr) here's the Tumblr-inspired version of the Pinboard spec: Fandom platform of the future - specs and features, on Google Docs.

How much of that gets into Pinboard, Dreamwidth, AO3, or anything else is anybody's guess. But fen are amazing, and anything can happen when you dive down a rabbit hole.

It's been a week. Not only are we moving house, a large number of people are moving from LJ to Dreamwidth. I'd already mostly moved, and since I have a permanent account I'm not likely to leave completely, but I've been reducing my exposure -- the entire journal is marked "adults only" and I've taken off all of my interests and most of my personal details. I also gathered together and posted a few notes on the process, under the tag ljexit. Feel free to crosslink, and to use the tag yourself.

Monday was a bit rough, both emotionally and physically exhausting, from spending all day at Rainbow's End organizing and sorting. I did some finishing-up Tuesday night, taking advantage of a dentist appointment and the resulting personal day, when our mover failed to show up. (We found out later that he'd been in an auto accident on the way up.)

Tuesday night was miserable and mostly sleepless, and I woke up on Wednesday with a queasy stomach and muscle aches. It was a close enough match for flu that I called in sick. As it turned out, though, it's more likely to have been physical overwork, lack of sleep, dehydration, and low blood sugar from having been thinking about things other than self-care for much the previous two days.

Thursday at 1pm our listing went live: 4126 37th Ave SW, Seattle, Washington 98126 | The Warmack Group. If you're reading this and interested, the open house is this weekend, and you only have a couple more days to get an offer in.

Friday I got in to work late, having gone with N. to look at another house. I very much wanted to get in to work for the last meeting of the day, with $BOSS and $HR_PERSON. Um... yeah. I've been offered an "early" retirement package. (Scare quotes because it would be only a couple of months before my target date.) I may very well take it. The emotional roller-coaster ride one might expect from having to look reality in the face from up close, but at this point I think I'm ready.

Saturday -- yesterday -- Naomi and I went to look at The Dome House in Monroe. It was magical. Almost perfect for us -- EXCEPT: it's isolated as heck, at the end of a mile of twisty, narrow, gravel road. Haul the garbage to the dump yourself. Lots of unpermitted, unfinished construction in the barn. It would have been perfect for who we were 20 years ago. *sigh* I wouldn't have missed seeing it, but it makes me sad to have to pass it up. N called it the other end of the rainbow. Had a great talk with the owner, who is moving to someplace dryer for health reasons.

So that's the week. I'm glad it's over.

( Notes & links, as usual )

Here, in two easy pieces, is how to fix Livejournal's recent problems.

Fixing the comment page.

1. First, if you're still using an S1 (ancient) style, switch to S2.
2. Go to your profile.
3. Go to Journal > Journal Style, and in the box headed <yourID>'s Current Theme click on "Customize your theme" (or just follow the link)
4. Under "Basic Options", find the line labeled "Disable customized comment pages for your journal". Select "No". (As in "no, don't fsck up my comments".)
5. Go to Profile > Settings > Display(tab) (or just follow this link.)
6. Under "Comment Pages", check the box for "View comment pages from my Friends page in my own style"

Fixing DDOS attacks, Rich Text Editor failures, and a host of other problems.

1. Go to dreamwidth.org and create an account. For the rest of this year you can create a free account without an invite code, but a paid account is well worth the price.
2. From your profile, go to Organize > Manage Account > Other Sites (tab), or follow this link.
3. Add your LJ account under "Crossposting", and check the boxes under "Crosspost by Default" and "Display Crosspost Link". Now anything you post on your shiny new DW account will be crossposted to LJ.
4. Go to Organize > Import Content (or follow the link to Import Journal). Import your old LJ contents. Do this every month or so to import the accumulated comments.

Now, sit back and watch the ongoing decline of LJ with a certain air of amused detachment.

I will not be cross-posting my LJ comments or links to them on twitter, facebook, or any other social network. I may conceivably cross-post my own posts between Dreamwidth and LJ, though in which direction is unclear, and I haven't done it yet. I may conceivably cross-post my twitter updates to LJ via one of the usual culprits; currently it doesn't represent enough bandwidth to be worthwhile.

I try hard never to put links to other peoples' locked posts anyplace in my LJ, even in friends-locked posts, because I know that some people don't even want the existence of their locked posts known. Similarly, I don't put links to my own locked posts anywhere except in other posts on the same filter.

If I make a comment on somebody's locked post that I think is worth making public, you'll find it here with all the serial numbers carefully filed off.

I actively encourage people to link to my public posts, and have no problem having my LJ name associated with my real one. However, when I finally get around to establishing a presence on Facebook, it will not link back here. The last thing I need is FB rummaging around in my friends list.