Looks like old school buttons!

How to block certain topics/keywords on DW

Someone on IRC was talking about the origin of the name Dreamwidth Studios. I think this has never been posted before, so I went and dug up some old emails. These are all from March and very early April of 2008. I pulled out relevant sections, too, so they're slightly diced up.

Anyway, I hope people enjoy this. This all took place on the "Project Crazy" mailing list, which is what I called it. Because really, we all had jobs and lives, this was kind of an insane proposition. Yet here we are today.

from sharpiefan, posted 2018

Has a lot of tutorials on specific Dreamwidth things, with guides for people coming from other social media platforms

See also: Finding People on Dreamwidth

so here is a primer for those of you thinking about making a dreamwidth account. this post ranges from your really basic starter tips to the completely esoteric things that come from using it for a decade.

Written 2018, so a bit out of date. But still good!

SFF books by Dorothy J. Heydt

Digital Book Index provides links to more than 165,000 full-text digital books from more than 1800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites. More than 140,000 of these books, texts, and documents are available free.

Has Australian public domain books specifically, and they differ from the main PG which is US-focused!

Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for you to enjoy.

Over 70,000 ebooks, mostly classics, in all sorts of genres! You can follow the RSS feed to see recent additions, too.

Keeping the legacy of Sir Terry Pratchett alive forever.
For as long as his name is still passed along the Clacks,
Death can't have him.

Romance book database, with helpful things like filtering by trope or romance type

This here's a page to hold sets of Mood Icons, which can be used with weblogs and the suchlike. At the moment, hmm, it has three sets. The intention is to create these to be used with LiveJournal.

Doctor Who themed icons and mood themes!

If you want to give people another options from leaving a comment...

So, this is basically fifteen years' of trial-and-error learning on how to make dreamwidth posts that will produce good comment discussions involving lots of people. After fifteen years, I am at the point where if I'm sitting at home feeling depressed and in need of human conversation, I can make a DW post and have enough comment notifications to keep me in ego boost for several days. And a lot of what makes this work is just fairly simple strategies that I wish more people knew.

This is my attempt at compiling a masterlist of masterlists of communities on Dreamwidth. Obviously this will always be a work in progress and I'm going to add lists as soon as I find them.

I've heard that some people are joining DW and then finding it really difficult to figure out how to find content that they want to see when DW doesn't have an algorithm to suggest things to you. So I thought I'd share my methods of finding content that I want to see.

One of my favorite kids books! And weirdly available online?

In September 1993, I was staring at the world map pinned to the wall over the computer, contemplating all the places Karin and I planned on visiting in short excursions from work over the next twenty years. Suddenly I realized we could make a continuous path out of the trips. I quickly justified it by saying that the separate trips would not leave enough time to see much, and would be more expensive. The daydreams started to sound like good ideas, then I started justifying a longer, or more open-ended time and money allocation!

Six years of reading rec.travel allowed me to think that way. Discussing it with Russell Gilbert and other travellers became time consuming, so I organized this guide as a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) for the newsgroups, a starting point for further discussion, and my small contribution to fellow travellers. All comments are welcome and appreciated.

We left in July 1995 and "The Trip" was even better than we expected. Here is where we went for 31 months (arrows are flights): Florida → Dallas → Denver, San Francisco, Yosemite, LA → Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia → Australia → New Zealand → Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, China, Pakistan, India, Nepal, India → Netherlands → Florida → Caribbean → Florida → Caribbean → Florida and SE USA. We came home early to see family and save up for future travel. Some of the places we want to visit next are Peru, Turkey, Southern Africa, Southern India, Myanmar, and Cambodia.

We all love libraries, and we all love reading - but that’s not enough. It’s essential that more leftists become involved in their local libraries. We’re being out-organized by a right-wing movement that’s focused on taking over public institutions to privatize & weaken them.

We on the Left(s) must focus on strengthening and expanding public institutions that we value.

That means stepping up in our local communities and taking action in the places that decisions are made. Each local public library is governed by a library board, although specific structures vary from system to system. If we want to defend public libraries, we need to find out how power works where we live, and start showing up.

This is a HUGE archive of livejournal icons I saved/collected between 2006 to 2011. It's definitely an internet time capsule of sorts. (I used to collage these into pages to decorate my 3-ring binders for school.) These were my first introductions to graphics editing, super early internet jokes, and things that would evolve into aesthetic moodboards that would later appear on tumblr.

Some shortcuts to using helpful tools on Dreamwidth!

For the curious, icons are used in a very similar way to how reaction images and gifs are used on Tumblr.

I know a lot of people who don't visit DW very often because they think it isn't active. Well, it isn't Twitter or Tumblr, but there's plenty going on! So I thought I would compile a list of active comms that can help fandom peeps put some life into their DW reading lists and keep them apprised of upcoming events.

7 basic tips, very easy to read/understand if you're overwhelmed with the other guides

Resource list to other posts about being on DW!

This is something of a follow-up to my first Dreamwidth primer, because I completely forgot to talk about it. The features discussed in this post will be old hat to people familiar with LJ/DW style comments – this is mostly for Tumblr users.

History of early internet and hackers, very interesting (IMO)

SFF books published by Baen and released for free!

Girlebooks is your resource for classic ebooks by female writers. This site is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Joyce McDonald.

Really nicely formatted ebook collection, and a good place to start if you want to read more books by female authors.

Welcome to Project Gutenberg Canada! The ebooks on this website are in the Canadian public domain, and are offered to you at no charge.

Distributed Proofreaders provides a web-based method to ease the conversion of Public Domain books into e-books. By dividing the workload into individual pages, many volunteers can work on a book at the same time, which significantly speeds up the creation process.

The group that fixes up the books that get released to Project Gutenberg!

Mostly classic books! A new book is voted for each month.

Annual event, usually in the spring. Sometimes also a fall readathon!