(no subject)

[arethinn]

If anyone is pissed off enough at the Facebook/Twitter Connect thing that they would like to test the waters at Dreamwidth, I have a bunch of codes. You can also usually find codes for the taking at dw_codesharing. Their journal importer is pretty good - it'll even import the comments on all your posts. (Unfortunately that feature doesn't yet work on communities IIRC.) And you can set up the crossposter to crosspost back to LJ/IJ if you want (to be clear: that's all it does, is let you post copies of your posts to your accounts on other journal sites; a free account gets 1 such crosspost, paid gets 3 - "paid premium", a level that doesn't exist on LJ, probably gets more), and when you edit a DW post it'll automatically edit the remote copies. I've actually been posting everything to my three accounts from DW for some months now - you just can't really tell because I don't have it set up to put an identifying footer on the remote posts.

BTW, my own policy on this: I don't have a Twitter account. I have a Facebook account, but I don't actually make use of the thing. I will never crosspost any of my posts or comments to either site. And please for $DEITY's sake I hope you will not post any comments you may make in my journal or on anything I've posted in a community there either.

Comments

[dragonzuela.livejournal.com]

I'd kind of like it if there were something that would put my Facebook posts into LiveJournal, since LiveJournal is much more convenient for archiving random thoughts. But put my LJ posts into Facebook? Why??? Put my comments on other's LJ posts into my Facebook? Bwah?

If my LJ were something that I wanted to share with everyone using something as loud-mouthed as Facebook or Twitter, I would probably be using Blogger or something, not LiveJournal.

[arethinn]

lol @ the characterization of Facebook and Twitter as "loud-mouthed". Quite apt.

[charcoalfeathers]

I've seen DW pop up a lot lately, and goodness knows I have no love for LJ. The place has become rather hideous with all the full page pop-over ads and such. The main reason I'm here is because of the community, but it seems like people are heading over to DW quite a bit lately..

Anyway, I'd be interested in a code.

[arethinn]

DWRF4WTGMR9WSAAALFCW

[charcoalfeathers]

Thanks, done! I went ahead and took charcoalfeathers on there. (It's what I wanted here, but it was taken...)

[charcoalfeathers]

Dare I ask how you got the nice-looking DW link? It seems DW supports cross-site linking but LJ does not.

[arethinn]

Which link do you mean?

[charcoalfeathers]

The dw_codesharing one. But I just realized that it probably did that automagically when it cross-posted.

[arethinn]

Yeah. The <user name="blah" site="blah"> thing is pretty useful. If you don't specify a site it assumes you meant a DW user. When you post from DW it does the code acrobatics necessary for the right icons from whatever site to show up both on DW and in your crossposts on other sites.

It's possible to do this on LJ but it's not a nifty baked-in feature. http://dreamthoughts.org/box/lj.html will generate code for a "fake tag", that is, it gives you a box of the actual HTML like the sites themselves are generating on the back side when you type <lj user=" "> or whatever, but though it generates usable links to accounts on a few other sites (including LJ) it seems to want to use the LJ userhead for all of them. If you want the right icon you have to fetch its img src from the site in question and paste it in manually. Sample output from the page when I say "Give me code for user shyfoxling on InsaneJournal":

<a href="http://www.insanejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=shyfoxling"><img src="http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif" border="0" style="vertical-align: bottom;"></a><a href="http://www.insanejournal.com/users/shyfoxling/"><span style="font-weight: bold;">shyfoxling</span></a>

As you can see, it links to my IJ ok, but it's using the LJ icon. If I want "Tweak" () I have to copy the http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif bit from IJ and paste it in instead of the image from stat.livejournal.com.

Similarly, you can fetch the DW userhead from http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png, and paste that in, but since the generator doesn't know DW you also need to paste in the appropriate profile and journal links. All in all a bit of a pain and I don't often do it. I really like the handy code on DW posts that does it for you.

[arethinn]

Sorry, didn't repaste the code unmunged so you'd see the result:

shyfoxling

vs. shyfoxling if I bother to paste in the Tweakhead.

[arethinn]

Oh, I should mention: DW furnishes its own "fake tags" at the bottom of every account profile, "To link to this user, copy this code:" Just copy what's in the "Elsewhere" box and paste it into your LJ comment or post, and there you go.

<span lj:user='dw_codesharing' style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='http://dw-codesharing.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png' alt='[site community profile] ' width='16' height='16' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='http://dw-codesharing.dreamwidth.org/'><b>dw_codesharing</b></a></span>

dw_codesharing

[charcoalfeathers]

That's pretty neat. It's pretty clear that DW intends to woo away LJ's current user base. They are basically LJ as it was about 10 years ago, right up to the needing to be invited or pay.