How is Dreamwidth better than LiveJournal?
Dreamwidth has already changed the following things from the LiveJournal code:
- LiveJournal’s “friend” system has been split in two allowing users to subscribe and/or grant access to other users. This is a long awaited feature for many LiveJournal users who find the word “friend” a loaded term.
- You can import your personal journal including entries and comments from LiveJournal and some other sites based on LiveJournal code, so that you don’t have to lose a thing.
- Usernames, entries and comments have had their character limits extended to 25, 300k and 16k respectively.
- The four-word limit to each interest on a user’s profile page has been removed completely.
- Polls can be bigger than before.
- A member can now select “other” or “unspecified” instead of “male” or “female” for their gender if they wish to, promoting inclusion of the queer community.
- LiveJournal’s wishy-washy terms “adult concepts” and “graphic adult material” have been ditched in favour of “NSFW” (short for “Not Safe For Work”) and “18+” to be clearer about what they are and what they do.
- Other people can no longer flag up your content for review under for being adult material - your content, you’re in control.
- People can now describe why their content is not safe for work/18+.
- You can upload more than one user icon at a time.
- OpenID accounts are now easier to use and more functional.
- RSS and Atom feeds treat cut text appropriately.
- If you’re the administrator of a community, you get a warning if you try to delete your journal, reminding you to pick a new administrator.
- The Navigation Strip is more useful and now only shown to you when you want to see it, not when another user wants you to see it.
- Icons can be described for the benefit of users with screen readers, so that they know what your icon shows.
- Staff accounts are separate from personal accounts, so that people can tell when a staff member is speaking in a professional capacity.
- All LiveJournal tags have now been renamed to be generic, e.g. <lj-cut> is now <cut>.
- You can refer to people on other services using the <user name=”foo” site=”livejournal.com”> (or InsaneJournal, or JournalFen, or whichever site you like) instead of writing out the HTML. These tags respect the icons of the journalling site you are referring to.
- The spellchecker allows for custom dictionaries and new words to be added.
- The Lynx site scheme now displays whether or not you are logged in, and has a search function.
- Account security has been increased with a password checker.
- Quick Replies have a preview button.
- Screened commnts are more distinguishable.
- There is a random community page in addition to the random user page.
- You can list other accounts such as Twitter and Delicious in your profile.
- Comment notification emails no longer strip single carriage returns, and the entry preview now respects the “don’t use custom comment pages” option if the journal owner has it set.
- All FAQs are licensed as Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike, which means that this blog post is also available under the same license and the content can be used by anybody who wishes to, as long as they apply the same or a similar license to whatever they produce with it.
Dreamwidth is planning:
- The ability to rename icon keywords, retaining your old icon on previous entries and comments, and using the new one in the future.
- The ability to claim an OpenID account, so that OpenID comments display with your Dreamwidth username.
- The ability to own a Dreamwidth syndicated feed account (with authentication to verify that they are the owner of that content) and therefore change some of the settings, including commenting policies and the length of time the syndicated feed retains articles.
- Scheduled posts.
- The ability to sponsor the paid time of a random active free Dreamwidth user.
- A site contributors area, where people who’ve contributed to the project can get public credit.
- Clear upgrade/migration scripts so that site admins running a LJ-based site can switch over to using Dreamwidth’s code if they’d like to.
- Better community maintainer tools.
- Complete overhaul of the memories function.
- Exporting your journal as a .pdf file.
- A new photo hosting/image hosting system which is intended to be better than Scrapbook!
- Redoing the Inbox to make it more usable and flexible.
- Miscellaneous usability fixes and other improvements.
Murray isn’t a “sexist” in the old school, women should stay in the kitchen, kind of way. But “equality” doesn’t mean the right to insult people in sexist or racist terms and then shrug off criticism because “it was just a joke”. Unfortunately he’s representative of a deeper problem, that of trying to convince liberal, well intentioned men that feminism isn’t just about equal pay and opportunities, but about changing the culture so that we understand that there’s a difference between whether a woman has value as a person and whether you want to sleep with her. Murray has, in the past, said that he intellectually acknowledges this truth - and I believe him when he says it - but it still seems a while to go before the bravely “non-PC” liberals out there realise that if they make jokes that implicitly conflate those things that they’re undermining feminists’ attempts to make it
true.
I’m not trying for eloquence here. This is a rant.
Yes, swine flu is scary shit. But realistically every day we go out in the world there are dangers. Do you step out of your house and walk down the street? You could be hit by a car. Do you drive? Accidents happen every day. People get killed. You might be the victim of a violent crime today. You might catch an airborne disease that might make you die a cruel death.
Basically what’s going on right now is like when your friends or your parents buy a new house that’s getting built for them in some new suburb and get sooooo excited they forget other people don’t really give a shit, and during the building process they keep on going, OMG COME VISIT MY NEW HOUSE, and finally you cave in and go, and it smells like fresh paint and there’s no carpet just concrete, and you just kind of stand there going, uh-huh as they gush about the cabinets that are gonna be installed and that bay window in the dining area while sweaty construction workers work on putting in the fixings, thinking “dude, if you think I’m going to drive an extra twelve miles now to have movie night at this place as much as we used to, you are so wrong”.
