A Few Tips For People Migrating From Livejournal to Dreamwidth

Here are a few things I've discovered so far. I figured I might as well be helpful for other people, too.

If only I didn't have to lose all my previous friends, friends groups, filters, and all that!

You don't! Check out Dreamwidth's import tool. It seriously rocks. It will import from IJ and JournalFen as well as LJ, and it will pretty much import everything, if you want. You can select from different categories, such as "journal entries", "journal comments" (yes, you read that right!), "icons", "tags", "custom security groups" (yes, you read that right!) and so on.

Where did my friends list and my friends page go?

Away. This is a good thing. It's been broken up into two separate concepts: "subscribing" to someone's journal, and "giving them access" to your own. A lot of people have complained about Livejournal lumping those two things together for a long time now; Dreamwidth has finally fixed it.

Suppose you're a comics fan, and you want to read warren_ellis's journal. You have to "friend" him to get his entries to show up on your "friends page"... and as a result, he can now read all of your friends-locked stuff. Granted, he's probably too busy... but, would you really want to trust the creator of Spider Jerusalem and the bowel disruptor gun with that kind of access?

You just wanted to subscribe to Mr. Ellis' journal. He's not your friend.

Similarly, sometimes your friends post stuff that you're not interested in reading. You might trust them, and think they're a wonderful person, and look forward to the time the two of you can spend together... but they always post quiz results and memes that are just too fluffy, or they always post deep, intellectual essays on politics and philosophy, or whatever.

So give access to your friend, so he or she can keep up with what's going on in your life. And then you don't have to subscribe to their journal.

If someone was your friend on LJ, and you were comfortable with that arrangement, you'll want to give them access and subscribe to them. Now you see their stuff on your Reading Page (not a "friends" page; this is the people you read), and they have permission to read your locked entries.

The over-arching group of people that you subscribe to, or who subscribe to you, or who you give access to, or who you have access to... this huge group is called your Circle. You manage this collection on your "Manage Circle" page.

If only I could post simultaneously to DW and to LJ.

You can! In your account settings, check out the "Other Sites" tab: it will let you set up "crossposting" to other sites using the LJ codebase. With crossposting toggled on, you can have your post automatically duplicated on your other account.

I haven't investigated this thoroughly, but I have discovered a few things about it:

• If you have your LJ default set to friends-lock, the posts will show up friends-locked on LJ.
• Tags will be maintained. If you post to DW with a tag that doesn't exist on your LJ account, it will be created.
• If you post to DW with a userpic that also exists on LJ, that will be maintained, too.
• If you use Dreamwidth's <user name="some_user_name"> tags in your post, the links will go to some-user-name.dreamwidth.org — even on the LJ post.
• If you have your DW account set to automatically crosspost back to LJ by default, and you post using the Windows LJ client, it will not automatically crosspost. Auto-crossposting does work correctly if you post using the Dreamwidth "Post an Entry" web page.

If you post using a client program, and then realize that your entry didn't get crossposted, you can fix that by going to the "Edit Entry" page and clicking the check boxes for "Crosspost this entry" and whichever account(s) you want to crosspost it to.

Wait a second, does Dreamwidth have downloadable posting clients already?

That's the cool thing about re-using the Livejournal codebase: Your current client probably works already! When you set it up to post to your LJ account, there was probably a text field labeled something like "Server" or "Hostname", and pre-filled with "www.livejournal.com". Just set that to read "dreamwidth.org", and it will access your Dreamwidth account, instead of your LJ account!

Warning: If your DW account name is the same as your LJ account name, you can easily confuse the heck out of yourself this way.

Note: The only posting client I have is the old, original one — I think it's called the Visions client? The one that was originally by Brad Fitzpatrick, then maintained by Tim Yardley. I haven't tested in SEmagic, Deepest Sender, or anything else... but if it has a place to change the server, it should work fine. (And if not, then it already doesn't work with IJ, DJ, or JF, and you might want to get a better one anyway...)

Note that if you post via the posting client, DW forgets to automatically crosspost back to your LJ. But you can fix that as mentioned above.

I hope all that is helpful. Permission granted to link to this post; that's what it's here for.