A Glowficcer's Guide to Dreamwidth

[Kappa]

This is a glowficcer's guide to Dreamwidth. It is now somewhat out of date, as glowfic has pretty much entirely moved to the Glowfic Constellation.

~*~RESOURCES~*~

Utilities

• Greasemonkey script for previewing icons easily when commenting
• Userstyle to flatten out nested comments
• LJlogin for Firefox users who want to quickly switch between DW accounts
• LJ Juggler for Chrome users who want to quickly switch between DW accounts

Icons

• Hollow Art (search by facecast characteristics) (note that they added an ugly watermark recently and you need to save images to your computer if you want to use them without a giant yellow banner appearing across the bottom)
• PB Updates (tagged by facecast characteristics, less fine-grained)
• Wikicon (search by facecast name)

The Glowfic Community

• If you aren't sure where your glowfic should go, it should go here.

~*~TIPS~*~

Usernames

• it must be between 2 and 25 characters (inclusive)
• it must use only alphanumeric characters (A-Z, a-z, 0-9) and underscores
• it can't start or end with an underscore, or have two consecutive underscores
• We can help you pick one

Account Creation

• Go to the account creation page
• Enter your desired username & info; if the username is taken, it will complain right away
• Be sure to activate your email address or you can't post comments
• By default it shows the account's given birthday on its profile; you can edit your profile to change that, fill in the name field, etc.
• If you expect to have a lot of journals, it might be worth creating a collection community and joining it with all your character journals to keep track of them; use the community creation page to do so after you have your first journal, then join the community with each new journal as you make it

Icons

• The edit icons page
• If you use the (default) icon option when posting a comment, and later change your default icon, all those comments will update to the new default
• Commas in the keyword field separate keywords: only use them if you mean to do that
• If you sort an icon page by keyword it will list every keyword singly even when this means showing the same icon twice
• I and many other glowficcers prefer to sort my icons with one keyword each, prefaced by a number or letter, in order from happiest to least happy; this makes choosing one to go with a comment especially convenient
• It may also be worthwhile to pore over the icon resources and do a first-pass collection of icons before you begin uploading them to an account; I call this "herding icons" and I do it for all my characters
• The confusingly named "Rename Keywords" tickybox in the edit icons page that appears when you edit an icon's keywords field? That is for when you want to change a keyword without erasing all previous uses of the icon
• If you change a keyword without ticking the box, anywhere you have used that keyword will revert to (default); if you do tick the box, uses of the previous keyword(s) will be updated to the new one(s) - I don't have extensive experience with how this applies to icons with multiple keywords, because I never ever use those
• If, on the other hand, you want to update all previous uses of an icon to a new icon, what you do is save the exact keyword of the old icon, delete it, upload the new one, and give the new one the exact same keyword
• To credit an icon creator on insanejournal, use <user name="USERNAME" site="insanejournal.com"> in the icon's comment field

Misc

• You can change your notification settings to reflect whether or not you want to receive an email every time someone replies to one of your posts or comments. This is per journal, and the default is to be notified, so make it a part of your account creation steps if you have strong feelings about it.
• You can "track" a specific entry, journal, or community, and receive an email whenever someone posts a comment/entry there. There is a limit of 25 active notifications per account, but if you have multiple accounts (which I do) and clear out old items whenever you hit the limit (which I also do), it's very possible to be tracking all of the active glowfic at any given time.
• It's possible to edit comments, but only if they have no replies. This sometimes leads to deleting a comment so its parent can be edited, then reposting the comment. If you repost a deleted comment in the exact same place it was deleted from, without changing the icon or any of the text, the repost won't show up. Adding a space to the end of a line or changing the icon is enough to circumvent this problem.

[Anya]

I appreciate this a lot. :)

[Bluelantern]

This is great

question: It is possible to turn an normal account into a community or move posts to a community?

[Kappa]

No, and as far as I'm aware no.

[Kappa]

Post updated with links to LJlogin and LJ Juggler.

[Kappa]

Added a note about That Thing DW Does with reposting deleted comments.

[Unbitwise]

I got an idea. When a character appears in a thread somewhere else, make a link entry in the character's journal. Mostly an alternative to keeping an index entry, I suppose.

[Kappa]

That's a neat idea. Also, how'd I manage to leave the glowfic community out of the OP? *edits*

[Ezra]

This was about to fall off the first page, can it have a pin please?

[Alicorn]

Do people use it that much? I'd like to be very conservative with pins.