khfandommods | Dreamwidth for Noobs

How to Dreamwidth: Getting Started

Getting started on Dreamwidth is super easy, the whole system is extremely user friendly once you learn the basic controls! Here's a little step by step on how to get the ball rolling.

To get yourself a Dreamwidth account, go to dreamwidth.org and tap "create" > "create account". This will walk you through creating a journal. Unlike Tumblr, you can't just change your journal name at the drop of a hat, so choose wisely. You can rename your journal, if you really want to, but you have to purchase a rename token, and last I checked those cost $15, so... unless you wanna spend actual money, make sure you choose a journal name that you'll want to keep for the long haul.

Once you've done that, you can explore the different menus and poke around to see where things are. If you go into the option to edit your profile, you'll find a slew of important things you'll want to make sure are set to your preferences.

One of the first things you'll want to do, imo, is to adjust the viewing options. This has a lot of choices I personally always tweak right away.

This fucker right here is like the first thing I change, and everyone will thank you for it. UNCHECK THIS BOX IMMEDIATELY. That is the first rule of Dreamwidth Club. That will allow your journal to be viewed in the default site skin instead of whatever style you choose for your journal. You know those blogs on Tumblr that you desperately wish you could just view in your dash because the theme is so hideous or you can't read the damn text or there's a stupid autoplay or the cursor makes a frikkin frakkin rainbow sparkle trail that drives you bananas? Unchecking this box will make sure you're never that blog. If you do not uncheck this box, rest assured that people who visit your blog for any reason will bitch about you when you aren't around. Most everything else on that page can be poked and tweaked at your convenience, but please, for the love of God, uncheck that style box.

After that, I recommend addressing the privacy tab. Here you can set your journal to your preferred levels of privacy, which is why DW will always be infinitely better than Tumblr. Ignore the dropdown, idk why that's in the screenshot. Anyway, here you can choose who can see your contact info, who you can receive PMs from (basically Asks, except you have a character limit that is long enough to let you actually say more than two things, and you can include links), and set your minimum security level for new posts.

This is how you make your journal "friends only", to use an old LJ term. If you want everything in your journal to only be visible to people you have granted access to, this is where you do it. It doesn't matter if someone "follows" (subscribes to) your blog, if you don't grant them access, they can't see a damn thing. Logging out, changing IPs, or using sock accounts will never grant anyone access to anything you don't want them to see. Literally the only way for someone to be able to view your journal entries, if you set your blog to "access list", is for you to have deliberately granted their journal access to your posts. This can also be further filtered, so that even if your blog is already access-only, you can still filter it so only Tom, Dick, and Larry can see this particular post, or everyone but Jon Snow can see this one, because Jon Snow knows nothing and we sure don't want him knowing this. All that anxiety you have over who's viewing your stuff on Tumblr? Absolutely a zero-issue on Dreamwidth. If you have no specifically given someone access to your journal, they cannot see it no matter what they do, and even if they have general access, you could in theory still filter entries away from them. You can also make private entries that only you can see. You can always adjust the privacy options on individual posts, but this way every new post will default to your preferred initial level of privacy, so you'll never accidentally post something publicly that you wanted to be private, if you set it up that way.

Further down, we have options for who can comment to your entries, and to screen comments, which can be useful if you prefer not to set your whole journal to friends-only. This allows you to screen comments that are posted anonymously, or from people not on your access list, in case any of them are nasty, or to disallow anon commentary altogether. So if you don't want to completely lock down your journal, but you don't want a bunch of anon hate, you can make it so only registered accounts can comment on any entries, and even then, you can screen them before allowing them to show publicly. You can also set your journal to log IP addresses, so if someone is harassing you, you have their IP and can block it, and obviously you guys know what the ban option would do.

That's all the important basic stuff for getting started! From here, you can explore the rest of the menus at your leisure, upload icons, change your journal style (theme), create a sticky post, and many other things!

dreamcodes is an excellent resource for navigation tables, moodboards, and other fun code things you can put in your profile or on your main page, and

dreamwidthlayouts has some nice layouts if you can't find anything in the style picker that you like. Not all coding works properly in your profile versus journal entries, for some reason, so please bear that in mind and don't get frustrated if the profile doesn't always cooperate--it's not you, it's just the way the profiles are set up.

I'll do another tutorial with some coding shortcuts and dos and don'ts as well, if you guys like, to help you get started journaling!

If anyone has any specific questions, please feel free to comment below.