Until the Dragon Comes

myrtillenne posted: Highlight

New layout, from a wonderful designer - there are several colour variants on their post linked above. One day I'll get myself a Home Free header, but for now this is so pretty.

When Dreamwidth first went into open beta, two years ago today, I seriously considered getting a seed (permanent) account. At the time, though, I just wasn't sure enough that it was the right thing to do, and I wound up not getting one.

Two years down the line, I occasionally thought wistfully that it would have been nice, so when the announcement came that they were going to be selling another batch, I was determined I was going to get one this time. I fully intended to get up for 8am for the second batch, but at 1.30am realised I was still awake, and I might as well try for the 2am one. By 2.05 I had it all sorted, and was the proud owner of a shiny new seed account. :-D

It won't really make any difference to anyone else, I still fully intend to keep cross-posting and reading my LJ flist. But this is my primary journal, and somehow I'm happier knowing that I'm signed up for the long haul. :-) If there is anyone else who's cross-posting, and who I don't already subscribe to over on DW, do let me know.

On the other hand, I have been posting various other places recently, and if anyone feels like following me there, you're very welcome.

Twitter and Tumblr are both good, if their own way, if you don't have the time or energy for a proper journal post. They are very much slash fannish spaces for me, so expect a fair amount of squeeing and links to sometimes less than SFW things. :-)

I'm sally_maria on Twitter and sally-maria on Tumblr (there have to be some advantages to having such an unimaginative username ;-D).

I'm also on Facebook, and anyone who knows my real name is more than welcome to friend me there. That's my respectable side, though, with work colleagues and family friended, so I try and behave myself. ;-)

A lot of friends are having a bad time at the moment. *hugs you all* I just wish there was something I could actually do to help.

In the meantime, it's been Christmas setup week, so it's busy, busy, busy. Our house is still not selling and the one we were looking at in Winchcombe seems to have gone, so that's not the most positive thing in the world, either.

On the other hand, I had a great day on Saturday, eating dinner as lovingly prepared by gayalondiel, with her, and alitalf and Hibernia. We decided that as a cheese course was out - not really vegan enough - we'd have a chocolate course instead.

This prompted me to visit the local organic supermarket - the Natural Grocery Store - which is another good source of interesting chocolate, and closer than the Best Sweet Shop in the World Ever.

It occurred to me that I would like to keep a record of the interesting chocolate I've tried, and find out about new ones I might otherwise have missed.

So I decided to start a new Dreamwidth community chocolate_lovers - to talk about chocolate. Go and tell me about your favourite chocolate, and encourage your friends to do the same. This really isn't intended to be a monologue...

Sorry if it looks a bit of a mess this afternoon - I'm fiddling with the layout to try and get a new header and style to play nice together.

Unfortunately the CSS that works with Crossroads doesn't with Stepping Stones. :-(

ETA I've given up on Stepping Stones for the moment and gone for Basic Boxes instead. I haven't hit on a basic Dreamwidth layout that I like as much as Expressive, though a lot of them aren't bad. Crossroads would be the best so far, if it didn't have the cross i.e. if the sidebar stopped at the top of the title box, instead of carrying on to the top of the layout. It's barely noticeable if you use the layout as intended, but when you put a header image at the top it goes right over it.

Still, in all honesty, it's a minor point.

A couple of weeks ago I spent a while setting up feeds for some of the journals and communities I used to read on LJ. I thought the links might be useful, as Dreamwidth doesn't have a very practical way of finding them yet.

I'll sort them by theme, so you can hopefully find the ones you would be interested in.

( Comics )

( Tolkien Studies )

( Tech Stuff )

( Separated by... )

( Merlin Fandom )

( SGA Fandom )

( General Fandom )

( Miscellaneous )

If anyone has any suggestions for feeds I'm not following that you find interesting, do let me know in the comments - or make your own entry.

Two things you may not know...

If you're using LJ Hook - and seriously, if you're using Firefox, why aren't you using LJ Hook, unless you like typing HTML - then you'll be pleased to know that you can fix it to work with Dreamwidth. If you go to the bottom of the LJ Hook Menu, you'll see Preferences and from that menu you can pick Clones Manager. Just add dreamwidth.org to the list by typing it in the box and clicking Enable and Bob's your uncle, handy right-click menu and icon randomiser. :-)

ETA For those of you installing LJ Hook for the first time - the instructions seem to be dreadful to non-existent. If you are in a LJ text box, right-click and LJ Hook will be one of the items in the menu that comes up, just follow the arrows for the sub menus. The thing for randomising icons is a small greenish button that appears next to the drop down where you select the userpic/icon. Hopefully that should sort it out, but if you have any problems ask and I'll do what I can to help.


The other is that if you like the Dreamsheep, like the one in my icon, there's a whole community for posting and sharing them - dreamsheep. There's a download of the base in the first post, if you feel like making your own.

Along with a number of you, I've managed to get an invite code in the OpenID lottery. So you can also find me here - sally_maria.dreamwidth.org.

I love the idea of Dreamwidth and I'm really impressed with what I've seen of it so far. But I have lots of friends here and a permanent LJ account, so I'm not going to be disappearing off into the ether. At most, I'll probably start cross-posting my entries to both places.

Still, I encourage everyone who's at all interested to sign up with their LJ OpenID. That way you can follow and comment on Dreamwidth accounts without having to have an invite code or paying anything. And the current buzz is that everyone who signs up with OpenID before the end of April will automatically get an invite code when the site goes into open beta on the 30th.