CONTENTS

• WHY DREAMWIDTH?
• DREAMWIDTH AS A "SOCIAL MEDIA" SITE
  • friending people
  • communities vs journals
  • posting in your journal
• MAKING YOUR JOURNAL PRETTY
• MAKING A DREAMWIDTH POST
  • cut tags
  • collapsibles
  • inserting pictures
  • text formatting
• CONCLUSION

WHY DREAMWIDTH?

if you're reading this post you might already see some of the merits in using dreamwidth, but for the sake of completeness i'm going to compare dreamwidth to some other sites commonly used for fandom purposes and then explain what dreamwidth does differently/better (in my opinion) compared to those sites. it's not like i think dreamwidth is the best platform ever, but i definitely think it has its time and place in fandom spaces.

• ao3: yes, dreamwidth can also be used for fic posting, but unlike ao3 it isn't explicitly ~created~ for this purpose and as a result it will be difficult for interested readers to find your fanfic unless you link it on other platforms. this often has benefits (i.e. posting "embarrassing" fanfic only on dreamwidth... lol) for those wanting to deliberately decrease the size of their audience
• twitter: it's kind of like having a main and priv all rolled up in one account, because there's options to post things "publicly" or to only show the post to the people you have friended on the site. unlike twitter's it's a lot easier to archive and keep track of your content on dreamwidth (using tagging or the archive feature or even keeping a content directory like i do). also no one uses this site. as a result, it's a great place to dump more "controversial" opinions... there won't be any angry fans in your comments telling you to delete your content in order to "clear the searches" or whatever
• notion: notion is also a great place to dump long-form thoughts and share them with people BUT unlike notion dreamwidth allows other people to comment on said content. it's a lot easier to refer back to compared to twitter conversations/dms, similar to an ao3 comments section

you can kind of use dreamwidth for whatever you want, which is the whole fun in it. some examples of how i/my friends use dreamwidth:

• reviewing media (tv/books/movies/etc)
• ship manifestos/primers
• reference posts
• fic commentary
• lists of favorite types of food
• keeping a record of fannish history
• lyrics translations
• personal blog posts like what's in my bag or skincare routines
• reflecting on writing in general
• longform meta content (see i-land thoughts & what if i-land was set in 2018?) as an alternative to reaction threads on twitter
• posting unhinged fanfiction
• recommending music

DREAMWIDTH AS A "SOCIAL MEDIA" SITE

friending people

there are basically two different levels to "friending" someone on dreamwidth. you can

1. subscribe to their posts, which is the equivalent of "following" them. that way, their entries show up in your reading page
2. grant access to them, which means that they can read your "friends locked" posts (kind of like letting someone follow your priv account on twitter)

when you're viewing someone else's dreamwidth journal, the easiest way to friend someone is to click "add to your circle" — it should be an option in the middle of the top toolbar.

then you can choose whether you'd like to subscribe and/or grant access to that person.

your reading page is where all of your friends' most recent journal entries will show up. here's the link to my reading page for reference — it's where you can check to see whether your subscribed journals have posted anything new ^^

communities vs journals

on dreamwidth, there are two types of places where you can post things: your own journal, and then dreamwidth communities. communities are great places to find content aggregated about a certain topic. back when dreamwidth/livejournal was legitimately used for archiving fanfiction, people would often post a summary/blurb of their fanfic in a specific community that would link back to their journal post. it's also a great way for people to subscribe to content without friending someone unnecessarily. here are some examples of communities: salutant (community for a specific author's writing meta, separated from their personal journal); dwrp_icons (a community to find dreamwidth icons for certain fandoms); metafandom (community for interesting discussions on fandom).

honestly, people don't use communities that much anymore. again: dreamwidth is kind of a dead site, which is part of the appeal! basically all of the posts i create are located on my own journal.

posting in your journal

for posting to your own journal, there are a bunch of configurations you can choose to maximize your comfort. for example, you can choose to disable comments or screen comments, and you can mark a post as 18+ or warn for viewer discretion. most importantly, at the bottom next to the posting button, there's a drop-down menu next to "shows this entry to" that has three options:

1. everyone (public) — self-explanatory. people don't need to have a dreamwidth account to view your post
2. access list — only the people who you've "granted access" to can view this post, and they have to be logged in
3. private (just you) — only you can see the post. i use this when i'm drafting up dreamwidth posts.

there's also options to tag the post. here's an example of the tags i use to more easily sort through my journal. you can also choose to stagger tags, which will nest combinations of tags into certain categories. for example, if you want to post about different kpop groups, you could use the tag "kpop: enhypen" for enhypen and then "kpop: txt" for txt, and it would nest both tags underneath the category of "kpop." check out my friend's tagging system here if you'd like to see it in action. 

another important feature that i use a lot is back/front-dating posts. since posts are shown in chronological order in your journal, you can edit the date of your dreamwidth post to position posts accordingly.

 

for example, my "sticky post"/directory that i want at the top of my journal is dated for the year 2030 whereas my curiouscat archive, which i want at the back of my journal, is dated from 2016. if you'd rather just manually sticky the post yourself instead of fiddling around with the dates, you can also follow the directions here. 

MAKING YOUR JOURNAL PRETTY

i'm going to be honest: i'm not too good at making my journal ~pretty~. i think the simplest way to go about things is to look at the dreamwidthlayouts community and see if there's a layout that catches your eye. the resulting post will have instructions on how to add that custom theme to your journal. here are direct links to some layouts that i think are cute, though i recommend searching through the community yourself in case i missed something:

• bluer skies
• minimal
• teatime
• this is yesterday
• venus as a boy
• door to the river

when you're customizing your theme, editing things like the title and headings can usually be found under the "text" option.

the process of tweaking css for it to properly fit your purposes is a bit of trial and error, mostly. this post discusses some of the basics of dreamwidth layouts and might be helpful. i also use the google color picker while finding hex codes when i want to change the colors of text/links/backgrounds.

while we're on the topic of layouts: if you ever find yourself reading someone else's journal and the post is hard to read due to the layout that they have chosen, you can reload the page in your own dreamwidth journal's style by adding ?style=mine to the url, reload the page in the default dreamwidth site style by adding ?style=site to the url, or reload the page in a barebones 1990s-html-web-page style by adding ?style=light. for example to try it with this post:

• https://permutative.dreamwidth.org/8980.html?style=mine (note that you need to have a dreamwidth account for this to work)
• https://permutative.dreamwidth.org/8980.html?style=site
• https://permutative.dreamwidth.org/8980.html?style=light

MAKING A DREAMWIDTH POST

cut tags

one of the most important parts of dreamwidth post is adding the "cut tags." this basically ensures that when someone's scrolling through your journal, they don't have to go past a whole wall of text before being able to get to the next post. the easiest way to do this is to enclose all the text you want to have "behind the cut" with cut tags on the HTML side of things:

<cut>insert stuff you want to hide behind the cut!</cut>

That will create a cut that says Read more... like below.

If you want the cut tags to say something in particular, you can do the following:

<cut text="fancy cut with words">insert stuff you want to hide behind the cut!</cut>

and it'll turn out like this:

collapsibles

this is another way to hide your text. use the following html:

<details><summary>NAME OF DROP DOWN COLLAPSIBLE</summary> insert stuff u want to put within the collapsible... etcetera...</details>

and it'll produce the collapsible below.

NAME OF DROP DOWN COLLAPSIBLE

insert stuff u want to put within the collapsible... etcetera...

small warning: these are sometimes a little finicky (i've had experiences where the collapsible ends up deleting all of what i was writing). just be sure to watch out for that/make sure your writing saved somewhere else, i guess?

inserting pictures

i use this copy-pasted html every time i want to insert an image or gif:

<center><div style="max-width: 400px;"><img src="IMAGE URL HERE" width="400" alt="" /><a href="SOURCE OF IMAGE">(source)</a></div></center>

it'll give a centered image that's the same width as all of the gifs and images in this post. you can adjust the width if you want by altering the "400px"/"400" parts and delete the "source" part for when you don't need to credit things. (sorry for not knowing more about this stuff, but hopefully you won't need to do anything too fancy with images?)

text formatting

similar to formatting on ao3, you can <b>bold</b>, <i>italicize</i>, <u>underline</u>, and <s>strikethrough</s> text. another nifty feature are the different levels of headers, from

<h1>header one!!</h1>

to

<h6>header six!!</h6>.

i honestly use the heading tags more often than the font-size tags to alter the size of text on my journal. see here for more details on what text formatting you can use on dreamwidth.

CONCLUSION

and that's all i have! i hope this post was helpful ^^ special thanks to girlrock for the html help and feedback + stoplight for giving me some suggestions too! feel free to reach out on twitter or cc with questions or let me know what you thought.