Things you should do on Dreamwidth

[ilzolende]

There are some things that new people should do on Dreamwidth, like reading the Dreamwidth FAQ.

This post will probably be updated.

When posting, consider using Markdown. Notably, Dreamwidth HTML autoformatting turns line breaks into <br> tags, and will not autoconvert blocks of text separated by two line breaks into paragraphs, while their Markdown autoformatting will.

Be careful about images: right now, no user can use Dreamwidth to host more than 500 megabytes of images. A normal cell phone photo or screenshot is often over a megabyte. Compress these before you upload them. In addition to using jpeg/png compression, I'd recommend reducing the resolution of cell phone photos dramatically, and perhaps cropping them and using the Levels tool on them while you're at it. Most cell phones have a much higher megapixel count than they have useful data per pixel. View a cell phone picture at 100% and you'll mostly see blurriness and noise.

Be more social: Dreamwidth will not prompt you to interact with your friends, so you need to do this on your own and perhaps remind yourself, and also that maintaining weekly minimum quantities of various post types leads to more engagement.

Before getting too concerned about theme features, check out Dreamwidth's theme customization options. It's straightforward to edit colors, fonts, text sizing, and even add custom CSS. I thought my current theme would be intolerable due to it forcing all-caps, but I was easily able to disable text transformations and clean up the font sizing. Before I try making a Dreamwidth version of my Asterism theme, I might even try one of those themes that makes poor choices with letterspacing and then just disable the letterspacing.

List some interests on your profile, and if you're newly here from Tumblr, make a post on the_great_tumblr_purge.

Comments

[jamethiel]

(Here through the DW "latest" page, hi!)

All good advice! Thank you!

[lielac]

FYI, using Markdown is incompatible with any features that require HTML, such as cut tags. I just learned that the hard way. ;-;

[youzicha]

I just wrote a post using markdown and a cut, and it worked fine? I just wrote <cut>blah blah</cut>, and it still processed Markdown inside the cut tags.