dee-dub (and medialog)

[jazzfish]

I just went over to Dreamwidth to see if something that's always irritated me about LJ (having to wade through communities and feeds when I'm setting up custom friends groups) was a problem there as well, or if they'd solved it.

It turns out that as part of the utterly reasonable change from "friends" to "subscriptions" and "access," they've also split filters into "reading filters" and "access filters." And, naturally, only actual users show up in the "access filters" section.

I love it when problems solve themselves.

Anyway. Between DW's introduction of tag merging, the full-text journal search, and the automatic cut expander (truly a thing of beauty: in DW, cut tags now have a little arrow next to them, and you can click the arrow to display the cut content without navigating away from your reading page), and LJ's trashing of their home page, I'm even more of a fan of DW. I've already moved imported the contents of jazzfish_media into DW, and gone through and tagged them all as well. That was a remarkably painless process. From now on I'll be cross-posting medialog entries at DW and here, behind a cut so that they aren't inflicted on the people who chose not to follow the medialog. This will make for a good trial run for crossposting in general.

At this point, I'm waiting on three things before completely jumping ship: the ability to read flocked LJ posts from DW (required); photo hosting (just barely shy of required); and a client for the Device (optional). There's a strong possibility that all three of these things will be available by the end of summer.

jadelennox has put together a great post on why DW isn't all or nothing. Of particular interest: it's trivially easy for LJ users to log in to their OpenID accounts on DW, and I plan on recreating my existing flist and security groups using everyone's OpenID anyway. (Which may automatically set up OpenID accounts for you all anyway; I'm not quite clear on how that will work.) I've also got a handful of invite codes available should you want to create your own DW account. (In theory, someday there will be the option to merge comments made under your OpenID with your DW account.)

ETA: jadelennox also linked to coffeeandink's How to move from LJ to DW in six easy steps, which I should really include here since seeing that link go by was one of the several things that prompted me to make this post.

I plan to keep DW as my main journal, and use LJ to stay in contact with the large number of non-DW readers. So I'll be cross-posting to LJ. I'd prefer to keep all comments on DW; I expect the additional hassle of having to log in over there (and lose your userpics) will cut down even further on comments. What I can do is crosspost entries, leave comments active on the LJ side, and regularly import the comments from LJ. This, of course, means more work for me, so I'd rather not do it. Hence, a poll!

[Poll #1588628]

Comments

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Um... if anyone else I know is on DW, then I'm not aware of it, although I keep hearing other people talk about all their friends jumping ship. I'm a little skeptical about open ID-- I've been doing enough deciding not to bother commenting on things recently that I feel like having to log in to something else to do so would be a serious deterrent.

Admittedly, your talk of "full text journal search" intrigues me. Is there (hypothetically) any way of exporting lj history into a new account? (since you mention joined comment exporting...)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

also, I sort of want to request a code, since it seems my username isn't taken over there yet... [what was that smiley for rolling one's eyes at oneself?]

here, have a code

[jadelennox]

https://www.dreamwidth.org/create?from=jadelennox&code=57E6N5QASSJHVAAAAFT8


Also, you can absolutely copy over your LiveJournal history, including all of your old entries and (optionally) the comments in them. The comments come over with the OpenID names of the users who originally made them, so they can always log in to dreamwidth in order to edit or delete the comments if they want to. coffeeandink wrote about how to do this in "moving to dreamwidth in six easy steps".

Re: here, have a code

[jazzfish]

I totally meant to link to 'six easy steps,' too, because seeing that was one of the things that prompted me to get around to making this post/poll. Hazards of writing a post piecemeal over the course of several hours. Thanks!

While I'm here: being stumbled across by you however many years ago has been one of the more awesome things to have happened to me on the internet. Just so's you know that.

Re: here, have a code

[jadelennox]

You know, I don't even know what to say to that, except periodically I have one of those moments where I am all "How do I even know Tucker? Oh well, it doesn't matter, because thank goodness I do."

*mutual ♥*

Re: here, have a code

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[jazzfish]

jadelennox pretty much covered it, but, yeah, you can totally import existing LJ entries. The full-text search has been one of those "how on earth did i live without this?" things, and that was just for the eighty-odd medialog entries. And the cut-tag expander still makes me a little happy every time I use it. (Which isn't all /that/ often, I usually prefer to get both the full entry and the comments in a new tab, but it's still nice on those few occasions.)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Yeah-- I end up spending an hour or two looking for something I don't quite remember when I posted a few times a year. On the other hand, I'm going to have to play around with reading & privacy groups, since my current manner of lj use is a complex construct between friends lists & bookmarks in my browser and may not work with their unified reading list concept. We shall see.

(Import queue is still slow-- I told it to do the icons, test-wise, and it's been waiting an hour now. Maybe lots of people decided to switch over for the holiday weekend or something?)

[jazzfish]

Heh. Yay for ad-hoc workarounds for ill-designed things, which then get broken when the design improves.

DW-Mark said that the importer's back up and running, and it looks like your icons have gone through.