1. I posted a tutorial on how to set up an OpenID account on Journalfen to getting_started, so if anyone has JF comments importd here that they'd like to eventually claim, they should mark it. (metafandom is still linking to the draft version of the tutorial, but hopefully that will change.)

/me officially washes her hands of S2 forever.

2. /me has sauntered vaugely downward into the #dw irc channel. Curse you, Opera, why did you make that so easy?

If previous experience with IRC stands, I will stay in channel for about a week, and then get behind and never go back. But hEll bot is adorable.

3. damned_colonial posted this meme:
Comment on this post. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so others can play along.
...and I told myself that the next time somebody I read posted it, I would do it. So:
( local politics, regional soft drinks, spike jones, the primordial ass, crossovers, fleegix, and oracular pigs )

PS: Is anyone else getting an occasionally-recurring error when they try to preview from the web interface? I keep getting: [Error: Can't call method "imgtag" on unblessed reference at '/home/dw/current/htdocs/preview/entry.bml' line 106. @ dfw-web02]

Unblessed indeed, DW. Unblessed indeed.

I had forgotten how I react to coding. This is how I react to coding: I went from knowing nothing about anything but basic html to dreaming about Core2 last night. In about six hours. (Of course, for some reason I also dreamed that treewishes was secretly Terry Brooks, so that may not be diagnostic.) I am not *good* at coding, because what I enjoy is crashing through reinventing the wheel and doing things the wrong way by trial-and-error and example without actually reading the directions or re-using old solutions; but I do find it hard to *stop*.

Anyway, after hours of pounding away, I now have a DW style that is a vague approximation of the ugly, crufty, half-broken S1 style I use in various hacked-together forms on LJ and JF. Only on LJ and JF it is high-contrast black, and my DW version is very, very pink, mostly to thumb my nose all all the anti-Tropo Red people. :P (The One Pig With Horns is just a placeholder image, though, promise, stellar_dust.)

The important thing, though, is that it has custom friendlist colors!!! I am just synesthetic enough that seeing my flist people without their proper color screws with my head. So, style with custom colors! (If anyone wants to use this style, which is a variant on LJ's Punquin Elegant, or the Generator port I made, I can give you the core2-compileable source, and if you'd like me to port another basic LJ style over instead, let me know and I'll try it; the code is really, really ugly though (I mean, even in the original S2 version before I mucked with them it was ugly, and I could tell this without even previously knowing anything about S2. Here's how ugly: I had to look at the Core2 test style in order to figure out how to add comments.)

( Herein I talk about styles coding such that anybody who actually knows about it will laugh at the stupid, because I have forgotten how to talk about programming, and anybody who doesn't will be bored to death. )

Anyway, more important question (And test of polls!)

I think ... I think I may have just got the first Dreamwidth post to get linked on metafandom.

(And there is a DW metafandom now! Yay! This place is waking up *so fast*, omg, I blink and another whole segment of fandom is here, it seems like.)

Anyway, with encouragement (in the form of "I wish our users would stop being so damn chicken", though possibly with more profanity) at the stitch'n'bitch Sunday, I finally sent some beta-y-notes to domtheknight; hopefully I will send the ones that go to denise today. (This seems like small news, but omg, I am so bad at interacting at any sort of official level about anything, it's really really sad.)

I'm actually sort-of doing site beta stuff on three different places now: closed beta at http://dreamwidth.org ; http://librarything.com which has been in beta for five years now, is still in beta, and will always be in beta; and http://interrobangstudios.com, the artists' collective/independent comic studio I work in with some RL people, that is in the middle of yet another redesign. And the process is so very different!

For interrobang, which consists of five people and one site and spare time, it consists of messing with stuff and then yelling at das Flughafen over Skype when I see something that looks off, and then having formal meetings where we talk about design and vision and all sorts of deep stuff.

For librarything, it consists of going on the site talk, bug collectors, and recommend site improvements boards and whining about whatever's wrong, and if the developers notice and feel like it, they'll fix it, and if they don't you keep whining until they do. (It's only been four years of whining for some features!) Meanwhile we write haiku back and forth with the people in charge. LT is a hobby site that got out of hand, and the guy in charge is the sort who in principle likes open source, but in practice is too ashamed of his coding practices to let the public see what he's perpetrated.

And then there's DW, which is all about teamwork and openness and joy! And once you've figure out who you need to talk to and where you need to go and what documentation you need to look at, things just get done!

( I am still trying to figure out who/if I should mention each of these things to, because they are all fairly small, but here they are for my own satisfaction )

If anybody else finds any issues trying to play with the site, they can comment here.

I was making a parallel list of "things that are awesome", but it got too long. :D

I do *adore* the new menus, though. I'm so used to badly organized sites that I automatically go to the logical place for an item, then go to the least-obvious without even looking because it's *never* in the logical place, -- and then I have to go back, because on DW, it *is*.

Also the inbox and the navigation bar are actually useful OMG! And the new user and cut and such tags! And, and, and!!!

You know what? I think the absolute most appropriate thing I can possibly put in my first-ever-Dreamwidth post is a rec for my sister stellar_dust's just-posted DW ficlet (DW as in Doctor Who, not DreamWidth, although the reason it's so appropriate is that the DW could, totally, also stand for Dreamwidth, because it is a story about the unspeakable eldritch horrors that lurk in the hearts of web-page-coding and the awesomosity of women and computers, all in just 325 words):

A Perl of Great Price.

Go read it.