Answers to Dreamwidth questions

Our lovely co-owner has been watching the DW posts and put a post of her own together to answer some of the questions that have come up frequently.

DW fact sheet

Just to add a few of my own:

The current default journal style will not likely be the final default style. It's just the first one that got ported over completely! There are still a few bugs with it, as with all things during closed beta. (If anyone currently in testing wants to make use of the Core 2 Testing skin I made, instead, feel free to copy this into a theme layer.)

The default site scheme is still being poked at a bit, but it should be readable now at high res and low, no matter your font size.

On other topics, I'm interested to see the culture that's developing. A number of people are a lot more open in their posting and disclosure of identity. Being the web-cynic I am I hope this doesn't come back and bite anyone as time goes on, but right now it's all very bright and cheerful. Some people are using DW for a new start and some are importing all their history. Special interest comms are starting to pop up. There's still sawdust everywhere and the wallpaper isn't hung, but the roof seems to be on and the plumbing is working!

We're rocking now

Right! All tags are regularized across journals, and I have further tweaked my wp crossposter to only crosspost things after a certain date, which eliminates the repeated entries I was dreading the idea of having to delete by hand.

On to the userpics! If I'm understanding how the back end works, entries from different journals that have the same userpic keyword in that field should draw the same userpic here. Never thought I'd be grateful for LJ's tendency to use metadata names instead of unique id numbers.

Also, for anyone who wishes to make use of this theme/skin I've made for Core 2 Testing, the layer is here. All you need to do is copy it, go to the advanced customization/developer area > Your Layers, make a theme layer based on Core 2 Testing, and paste that text in.

...well, that and hope that bloody damn HostMonster can keep my freaking sites running, because that's where the style sheet is hosted.

ETA: And not mind your tags being in a list.

Getting to kno~ow you...

Okay, since everyone is coming in here pretty much cold, a This Is Me post seems like a pretty good idea.

I'm from Michigan (US state the looks like a mitten, in the middle of all those huge lakes). I'm also something of a homebody. I like to see new places, but I only want to live where every breath and flicker of leaves conveys what my very bones insist is the only proper proportions of water, trees and hills: lots to lots to lots. I'm a local girl, but only for a few generations--French-Canadian, Irish, German, Euro-mutt from the Appalachians, educate selectively and stir vigorously.

I'm also a small-town girl, though this is sometimes oddly mitigated by the small town in question being right next to Ann Arbor (kind of the Greenwich Village of Michigan). Really big cities, like say the capital of Ohio, the state one south where I now live, delight me in small doses but I get cranky when I have to live there.

I was raised blue->white collar by parents who were raised blue collar and poverty line, and my mother was a union officer for years. I was shocked and appalled when I moved down here (away from close proximity to Detroit and the auto unions) and discovered that the university teachers aren't unionized. Shocked, I tell you. It was like someone saying, no, the sun rises in the north hereabouts. My heart-home is academia despite the fact that I frequently find its pretentiousness utterly intolerable; I value good teaching and the self-awareness that promotes good teaching far more highly than raw IQ.

I am politically liberal, fiscally conservative and staunchly republican in the 18th C sense. I'm married, poly, cheerfully bisexual and think people who write well are really sexy. I am, for want of any more pithy description, an esoteric atheist. I don't have any problems with theists, provided they don't try to spoon feed me their god(s), and I'm always up for a good discussion of mysticism.

I have a few spheres of major activity. The most public one, online, is my anime/manga fandoms, for which I squee and fic and meta. I also do website design, professionally or as a past-time depending on whether I'm teaching that term. When I'm teaching, I write a lot more about students and papers and which administrator I want to cluetrout this month. In the spring and summer I also write a lot about gardening.

I love Bujold and Pratchett as much as I love Woolf and Melville, and vice versa; I recommend everyone read bell hooks and Barbara Kingsolver; I teach Neil Gaiman in repertory with William Bradford.

So there we go--a thumbnail sketch. For more detail, you may like to visit alltrees.org or branchandroot.net.