![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
promethia_tenkUPDATED: In light of the new Terms of Service over on LJ, I think I have to amend my basic recommendation here to 'abandon ship as soon as possible.' I personally have deleted my LiveJournal. But a lot of this is still relevant to how to set yourself up over here.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Hello old friends and new. If you’ve not heard, LiveJournal is now being hosted on Russian servers, leading to many a declaration that this time, really, we are all moving to Dreamwidth. Really, really.
Pity Dreamwidth sucks.
As someone who made the move . . . *boggles* four years ago now, I am here to tell you that this does not have to be a misery. It also does not have to be an all-or-nothing thing, unless you want it to be. You, too, can move to Dreamwidth and like it.
I’m not going to tell you why you should move to Dreamwidth. If you’re still using LiveJournal, your reasons are probably well-established. But if recent events are making you think that you need to suck it up and move anyway, read on.
Look, I’ll be honest, I’m a bit of a technological drifter by nature. I jump hardware and software platforms all the time. Because I’m bored. Because I want a new challenge. Because I like the way my thoughts feel in a new box. It’s an adventure for me. I don’t expect everybody to feel the same way about things, but I will tell you if you can take on even a bit of this mindset, moving will be a lot more enjoyable.
Change! Adventure! A fresh start! A chance to rethink how you do things and why.
Go on, paint your room a new color! Maybe you’ll like it *eyebrow wiggle*
STAGE ONE: Decide you’re going to actually do it, and commit. I will tell you a secret: whether or not you successfully move to Dreamwidth is entirely in your hands. You can’t control what anybody else will do. Other people may follow you, or they may not. Whether they do or don’t, you can still be friends. You will, however, exponentially increase your chances of anybody following you if you actually make the move. Waiting for everybody else to do it properly with you is a surefire way for everybody to end up back on LiveJournal.
I read this advice on some long-forgotten Dreamwidther’s journal lo those many years ago when I was thinking about moving, and they were absolutely right. Choose to do it, and it will happen.
STAGE TWO: Choose your strategy. I would not personally recommend going cold turkey, deleting your LiveJournal, and trying not to look back. If you feel that is what you need to do, go ahead, but I suspect you would be making things hard for yourself for very little practical benefit. As others have noted, the damage is basically done: the Russians have your data already (and have for a long time), and ‘deleting’ it will not fix that. If you want to get your journal down from public view or you want to cut off your ‘escape route’ so you can’t go back, that’s fine, but realize that that’s all you’re doing. The important thing is to decide how much money/data/legitimacy you want to give LiveJournal going forward.
What I did, and I think what most people who successfully and happily move to Dreamwidth do, is migrate in stages. You can take these as slow or as quickly as you want to but, crucially, if you actually, really, truly want to make Dreamwidth your primary journaling platform, you need to take active steps to treat it as such. Just setting up cross-posting and then waiting for Dreamwidth to become interesting will not work. If you want this to be your home, put out your knickknacks, leave your shoes in the hallway, spill wine on the couch, and invite your friends over.
STAGE THREE: The practical stuff that you’ve heard about a million times and may have already done: make your account, set up cross-posting, friend all your friends, and import your LJ (some details on the nitty-gritty of this here.)
Dreamwidth has a brief rundown on some important practical differences between DW and LJ here.
aphelant made a more in-depth comparison of the two sites, with numerous useful links, back during Subject-Line-gate five years ago. Some of it is therefore out of date, but overall I think it's a good primer for people who want to start using DW seriously.
Something that doesn’t get mentioned as much, but I highly recommend is to claim your open ID comments. When you do this, any comments imported from LJ on your or anyone else’s DW will appear as coming from your DW account.
If you need a ‘no going back’ step that’s less drastic than purging your whole LJ (and if you want to keep DW afloat) is to consider getting yourself a paid account. It’s the ‘I bought a gym membership, so I’m going to use it, dammit!’ approach.
STAGE FOUR: Decorate. That Dreamwidth is ugly is a common complaint. Personally, I like the system pages better than LJ's, but I will admit that most of the layouts are pretty awful out of the box. Here’s the thing, though: Dreamwidth layouts are, on average, a lot more flexible than LJ ones. Almost all of them are designed to allow you to tinker with every damn aspect of their presentation without needing to do any coding yourself. Yes, getting something you like will probably take a bit of work, but if you can put aside wanting the site to be a perfect LJ clone, I’ll bet you can find something you will enjoy.
Custom themes are also an option. There are lots of good ones on![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
dreamwidthlayouts which you can install with honestly no knowledge of CSS. It is also, apparently, possible to import some of the LiveJournal themes onto DW, though I have no experience with this myself. I know you can get Flexible Squares over here. Here’s a quick Google search, for example.
About icons: Dreamwidth only allows additional icons for paid users, for reasons of system resources (apparently icons are a lot more resource-intensive than they seem). The good news is if you do have a paid account, you automatically get 100 icons and any additional icons you purchase are yours in perpetuity, for as long as you have a paid account (no annual charges).
Also about icons: if you give your icons on DW the same names as your LJ icons, cross-posting will automatically mirror which icon you use between the two sites (if you use an icon you don’t have on LJ to cross-post, your LJ post will show your default icon.)
If you can’t get used to all the red on Dreamwidth's system pages, maybe give purple a try? Or dark mode. Setting is here, at the bottom of the page.
If other people’s journals are hideous and you can’t read them, avail yourself of the handy ‘reload page in style mine/light/original’ links in the toolbar at the top of the page (available to both paid and unpaid users).
Beta post entries page: If you write your entries in html and never use the rich text editor, I highly recommend going here and enabling the beta test of the new create entries page. They call it 'beta,' but it's been around for years and I've never had a problem with it. It's very clean and pretty and you can customize the controls you see. Neat!
And last but by no means least, poke around in your browser's settings to find out what your default font size is set to. It may be making Dreamwidth look boxier than it needs to.
STAGE FIVE: Start privileging Dreamwidth over Livejournal. This is the crucial bit, and what separates the people who move to Dreamwidth from the people who visit and occasionally threaten to move but never do.
Read your Dreamwidth reading list before your LJ Flist. I made it my fist bookmark instead of my second. That simple.
Watch who reliably posts on both sites and who doesn’t. I recommend giving this some time--at least a month--because a lot of people are going to start and then give it up. If it seems like someone has truly made the move, make the move to reading and interacting with them on DW. Then, remove them from your default view on LJ (how to filter your friends list). No need to unfriend people on LJ, but you don’t want to have to read every person’s posts twice, and your reading list on Dreamwidth is now your primary portal, right?!? *nods*
Import things like newsletters over to your reading list using RSS. It sounds silly, but having![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
who_daily on my DW made a big difference in making it feel like my main site. Anyone can make their own feeds here, no paid account required. Unfortunately not all LJ journals or comms make good RSS feeds. Feeds cannot import anything behind a friends lock, and anything under a cut is going to show up in full on your reading list, so sites with a lot of long posts or content you might not want to see are going to be out. Besides newsletters, icon journals make good candidates.
Your reading list is as full as you want it to be. Find some new content and people to follow on DW. This may mean adjusting your expectations a bit. (I have some suggestions here. The post is pretty old, so some links are out of date, but might give you jumping-off ideas.) Another thing to consider: moving to DW, especially during a time of mass-exodus, can be like the first day of college. Everybody is a bit nervous and looking for a friend. Even old-timers are usually genuinely happy to meet other people who are serious about using the site, just be nice and non-creepy. And Dreamwidth’s separation between the list of who you follow on your reading list and who you give access to your locked posts means that you can get to know new people without having to commit to sharing everything.
Deciding where to comment on cross-posted entries: This is a real ‘weigh your values’ kind of deal. If you’ve decided you can’t give LJ a single scrap of your data any more, your choice is obviously already made. If you’re feeling evangelical and really want to help push your flist over to DW, go ahead and always comment on people’s DW post instead of the LJ one, though expect to meet some pushback and a lot of inertia. Personally, I prefer to take my cues from the person whose journal I’m replying to: if they’ve gone DW-first (or have expressed a desire to), then I’ll comment on DW. If they’re treating DW like a backup only (or if all the good conversation is over on LJ), then I’ll comment there. I think this is the biggest thing you can do to avoid being the annoying Dreamwidth person and, as long as you follow it, you’re probably not losing any friends.
STAGE SIX: The deep cuts. You may never get to this stage, and that’s fine. You decide how far you want to go. In general order of severity:
Disabling comments on your LJ. This scares people, and I’ll admit it’s a bit of a step. I wouldn’t do it right away unless you have serious reasons for needing/wanting to get off LJ right now. You will in all likelihood lose a few people if you do this, though probably less than you think if you take your time about it and let people get used to you being over here first. Unfortunately it can be hard to move discussion over to your DW from LJ without cutting off the option to reply on LJ.
Stop reading your flist. Again, this requires some sacrifice, and I don’t think there’s any need to force it. But you may find at some point that your reading list is much more active and interesting than your flist and that it feels like the right thing to do. There are still ways to keep tabs on the people over on LJ. Making RSS feeds of friends who don’t cross-post is one option, though note the caveats above about the limitations of RSS. If you just have a few near and dear LJ-holdouts, I would suggest setting up LJ notifications so you get an email whenever they post.
Stop cross-posting. This will absolutely lose you people, and in the past I've never seen much reason to do it as cross-posting is such an easy thing to do for the people you've left behind. I'll admit I'm thinking about it, though. I don't much like the idea of giving LJ anything further from me.
Delete your LJ?!? I'll admit, it seems unnecessary to me, though I can see the cathartic allure in the present circumstances. Unfortunately the data’s already out there, and you can’t take it back now. In the meantime, you'd be losing everything you contributed on LJ. Yes, you can back up your journal, but you'd be trashing your posts and comments on other journals and comms. For me, that represents far more posting volume than the contents of my actual journal. YMMV.
EXTRA RESOURCES: I can't possibly cover all the things you might want to do with Dreamwidth, but there is a very passionate community of people on this site who are devoted to helping you do it, whatever it is. I had about a million different pages open that I was thinking of linking you all to, but to simplify things a bit, I'll just give you this, a massive post of DW resources of all kinds. If there's something specific you want badly enough, you can probably find your answers somewhere down the rabbit hole.
I hope this is helpful to anybody feeling a bit overwhelmed about things and not knowing what steps to take and how. Feel free to link this to anybody you think could use it.
Change can be fun, if you embrace it! Good luck!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Hello old friends and new. If you’ve not heard, LiveJournal is now being hosted on Russian servers, leading to many a declaration that this time, really, we are all moving to Dreamwidth. Really, really.
Pity Dreamwidth sucks.
As someone who made the move . . . *boggles* four years ago now, I am here to tell you that this does not have to be a misery. It also does not have to be an all-or-nothing thing, unless you want it to be. You, too, can move to Dreamwidth and like it.
I’m not going to tell you why you should move to Dreamwidth. If you’re still using LiveJournal, your reasons are probably well-established. But if recent events are making you think that you need to suck it up and move anyway, read on.
Look, I’ll be honest, I’m a bit of a technological drifter by nature. I jump hardware and software platforms all the time. Because I’m bored. Because I want a new challenge. Because I like the way my thoughts feel in a new box. It’s an adventure for me. I don’t expect everybody to feel the same way about things, but I will tell you if you can take on even a bit of this mindset, moving will be a lot more enjoyable.
Change! Adventure! A fresh start! A chance to rethink how you do things and why.
Go on, paint your room a new color! Maybe you’ll like it *eyebrow wiggle*
STAGE ONE: Decide you’re going to actually do it, and commit. I will tell you a secret: whether or not you successfully move to Dreamwidth is entirely in your hands. You can’t control what anybody else will do. Other people may follow you, or they may not. Whether they do or don’t, you can still be friends. You will, however, exponentially increase your chances of anybody following you if you actually make the move. Waiting for everybody else to do it properly with you is a surefire way for everybody to end up back on LiveJournal.
I read this advice on some long-forgotten Dreamwidther’s journal lo those many years ago when I was thinking about moving, and they were absolutely right. Choose to do it, and it will happen.
STAGE TWO: Choose your strategy. I would not personally recommend going cold turkey, deleting your LiveJournal, and trying not to look back. If you feel that is what you need to do, go ahead, but I suspect you would be making things hard for yourself for very little practical benefit. As others have noted, the damage is basically done: the Russians have your data already (and have for a long time), and ‘deleting’ it will not fix that. If you want to get your journal down from public view or you want to cut off your ‘escape route’ so you can’t go back, that’s fine, but realize that that’s all you’re doing. The important thing is to decide how much money/data/legitimacy you want to give LiveJournal going forward.
What I did, and I think what most people who successfully and happily move to Dreamwidth do, is migrate in stages. You can take these as slow or as quickly as you want to but, crucially, if you actually, really, truly want to make Dreamwidth your primary journaling platform, you need to take active steps to treat it as such. Just setting up cross-posting and then waiting for Dreamwidth to become interesting will not work. If you want this to be your home, put out your knickknacks, leave your shoes in the hallway, spill wine on the couch, and invite your friends over.
STAGE THREE: The practical stuff that you’ve heard about a million times and may have already done: make your account, set up cross-posting, friend all your friends, and import your LJ (some details on the nitty-gritty of this here.)
Dreamwidth has a brief rundown on some important practical differences between DW and LJ here.
aphelant made a more in-depth comparison of the two sites, with numerous useful links, back during Subject-Line-gate five years ago. Some of it is therefore out of date, but overall I think it's a good primer for people who want to start using DW seriously.Something that doesn’t get mentioned as much, but I highly recommend is to claim your open ID comments. When you do this, any comments imported from LJ on your or anyone else’s DW will appear as coming from your DW account.
If you need a ‘no going back’ step that’s less drastic than purging your whole LJ (and if you want to keep DW afloat) is to consider getting yourself a paid account. It’s the ‘I bought a gym membership, so I’m going to use it, dammit!’ approach.
STAGE FOUR: Decorate. That Dreamwidth is ugly is a common complaint. Personally, I like the system pages better than LJ's, but I will admit that most of the layouts are pretty awful out of the box. Here’s the thing, though: Dreamwidth layouts are, on average, a lot more flexible than LJ ones. Almost all of them are designed to allow you to tinker with every damn aspect of their presentation without needing to do any coding yourself. Yes, getting something you like will probably take a bit of work, but if you can put aside wanting the site to be a perfect LJ clone, I’ll bet you can find something you will enjoy.
Custom themes are also an option. There are lots of good ones on
dreamwidthlayouts which you can install with honestly no knowledge of CSS. It is also, apparently, possible to import some of the LiveJournal themes onto DW, though I have no experience with this myself. I know you can get Flexible Squares over here. Here’s a quick Google search, for example.About icons: Dreamwidth only allows additional icons for paid users, for reasons of system resources (apparently icons are a lot more resource-intensive than they seem). The good news is if you do have a paid account, you automatically get 100 icons and any additional icons you purchase are yours in perpetuity, for as long as you have a paid account (no annual charges).
Also about icons: if you give your icons on DW the same names as your LJ icons, cross-posting will automatically mirror which icon you use between the two sites (if you use an icon you don’t have on LJ to cross-post, your LJ post will show your default icon.)
If you can’t get used to all the red on Dreamwidth's system pages, maybe give purple a try? Or dark mode. Setting is here, at the bottom of the page.
If other people’s journals are hideous and you can’t read them, avail yourself of the handy ‘reload page in style mine/light/original’ links in the toolbar at the top of the page (available to both paid and unpaid users).
Beta post entries page: If you write your entries in html and never use the rich text editor, I highly recommend going here and enabling the beta test of the new create entries page. They call it 'beta,' but it's been around for years and I've never had a problem with it. It's very clean and pretty and you can customize the controls you see. Neat!
And last but by no means least, poke around in your browser's settings to find out what your default font size is set to. It may be making Dreamwidth look boxier than it needs to.
STAGE FIVE: Start privileging Dreamwidth over Livejournal. This is the crucial bit, and what separates the people who move to Dreamwidth from the people who visit and occasionally threaten to move but never do.
Read your Dreamwidth reading list before your LJ Flist. I made it my fist bookmark instead of my second. That simple.
Watch who reliably posts on both sites and who doesn’t. I recommend giving this some time--at least a month--because a lot of people are going to start and then give it up. If it seems like someone has truly made the move, make the move to reading and interacting with them on DW. Then, remove them from your default view on LJ (how to filter your friends list). No need to unfriend people on LJ, but you don’t want to have to read every person’s posts twice, and your reading list on Dreamwidth is now your primary portal, right?!? *nods*
Import things like newsletters over to your reading list using RSS. It sounds silly, but having
who_daily on my DW made a big difference in making it feel like my main site. Anyone can make their own feeds here, no paid account required. Unfortunately not all LJ journals or comms make good RSS feeds. Feeds cannot import anything behind a friends lock, and anything under a cut is going to show up in full on your reading list, so sites with a lot of long posts or content you might not want to see are going to be out. Besides newsletters, icon journals make good candidates.Your reading list is as full as you want it to be. Find some new content and people to follow on DW. This may mean adjusting your expectations a bit. (I have some suggestions here. The post is pretty old, so some links are out of date, but might give you jumping-off ideas.) Another thing to consider: moving to DW, especially during a time of mass-exodus, can be like the first day of college. Everybody is a bit nervous and looking for a friend. Even old-timers are usually genuinely happy to meet other people who are serious about using the site, just be nice and non-creepy. And Dreamwidth’s separation between the list of who you follow on your reading list and who you give access to your locked posts means that you can get to know new people without having to commit to sharing everything.
Deciding where to comment on cross-posted entries: This is a real ‘weigh your values’ kind of deal. If you’ve decided you can’t give LJ a single scrap of your data any more, your choice is obviously already made. If you’re feeling evangelical and really want to help push your flist over to DW, go ahead and always comment on people’s DW post instead of the LJ one, though expect to meet some pushback and a lot of inertia. Personally, I prefer to take my cues from the person whose journal I’m replying to: if they’ve gone DW-first (or have expressed a desire to), then I’ll comment on DW. If they’re treating DW like a backup only (or if all the good conversation is over on LJ), then I’ll comment there. I think this is the biggest thing you can do to avoid being the annoying Dreamwidth person and, as long as you follow it, you’re probably not losing any friends.
STAGE SIX: The deep cuts. You may never get to this stage, and that’s fine. You decide how far you want to go. In general order of severity:
Disabling comments on your LJ. This scares people, and I’ll admit it’s a bit of a step. I wouldn’t do it right away unless you have serious reasons for needing/wanting to get off LJ right now. You will in all likelihood lose a few people if you do this, though probably less than you think if you take your time about it and let people get used to you being over here first. Unfortunately it can be hard to move discussion over to your DW from LJ without cutting off the option to reply on LJ.
Stop reading your flist. Again, this requires some sacrifice, and I don’t think there’s any need to force it. But you may find at some point that your reading list is much more active and interesting than your flist and that it feels like the right thing to do. There are still ways to keep tabs on the people over on LJ. Making RSS feeds of friends who don’t cross-post is one option, though note the caveats above about the limitations of RSS. If you just have a few near and dear LJ-holdouts, I would suggest setting up LJ notifications so you get an email whenever they post.
Stop cross-posting. This will absolutely lose you people, and in the past I've never seen much reason to do it as cross-posting is such an easy thing to do for the people you've left behind. I'll admit I'm thinking about it, though. I don't much like the idea of giving LJ anything further from me.
Delete your LJ?!? I'll admit, it seems unnecessary to me, though I can see the cathartic allure in the present circumstances. Unfortunately the data’s already out there, and you can’t take it back now. In the meantime, you'd be losing everything you contributed on LJ. Yes, you can back up your journal, but you'd be trashing your posts and comments on other journals and comms. For me, that represents far more posting volume than the contents of my actual journal. YMMV.
EXTRA RESOURCES: I can't possibly cover all the things you might want to do with Dreamwidth, but there is a very passionate community of people on this site who are devoted to helping you do it, whatever it is. I had about a million different pages open that I was thinking of linking you all to, but to simplify things a bit, I'll just give you this, a massive post of DW resources of all kinds. If there's something specific you want badly enough, you can probably find your answers somewhere down the rabbit hole.
I hope this is helpful to anybody feeling a bit overwhelmed about things and not knowing what steps to take and how. Feel free to link this to anybody you think could use it.
Change can be fun, if you embrace it! Good luck!
(no subject)
Date: 31 Dec 2016 04:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1 Jan 2017 12:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 31 Dec 2016 04:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1 Jan 2017 12:48 am (UTC)Nothing excites me like a platform war, tbh.
(no subject)
Date: 1 Jan 2017 12:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1 Jan 2017 01:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 31 Dec 2016 08:48 pm (UTC)You might know the answer to this question (or you may have already answered it.)
I was reminded that if Our Russian Lords and Masters do eventually decide to shut down LJ (I consider it a potentiality 1-3 years down the road), I won't have access to comments that were made over on LJ on posts that originated on Dreamwidth. I'm not sure that re-importing would be a good thing, because I'm not sure if that wouldn't simply wind up with me having multiple Dreamwidth copies of posts.
Would claiming an open ID, as you suggest be a way to ensure that, in the future at least, comments on my LJ will show up on the original Dreamwidth post?
Is it even possible that claiming the open ID could retroactively do that with earlier posts? Probably not, but it's worth asking about.
(no subject)
Date: 1 Jan 2017 12:40 am (UTC)I've also imported more than once and not had multiple copies of entries show up.
(no subject)
Date: 1 Jan 2017 12:53 am (UTC)I have only imported once or twice because I disabled comments on my LJ very shortly after joining DW and, let's be honest, I post, like . . . never.
My understanding, though, is that the importing feature is very good at keeping track of what everything is and not creating duplicates. That each new import brings over only the new stuff. The one exception I have heard of is someone who imported once, then renamed one of her journals, and then ran another import.
You may want to ask elisi, as I believe she runs imports semi-regularly.
ETA: what happens when you import comments from posts that you cross-posted, is that DW shows all comments from both sites on your DW post. It pretty much works exactly the way you'd want it to.
(no subject)
Date: 1 Jan 2017 08:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 1 Jan 2017 10:35 pm (UTC)How was the lag? I've been suggesting to people that importing will probably be slow and/or fail for the time being.
(no subject)
Date: 1 Jan 2017 11:39 pm (UTC)I honestly expected it to take a little longer than that, because Dreamwidth's system is dealing with so many new arrivals I got a news update that said DW had had thousands of new accounts in the last couple of days. Despite that, just an hour or so? I'd say that was a pretty impressive response time.
(no subject)
Date: 1 Jan 2017 11:46 pm (UTC)But I've had nary a hiccup.
And the DW news update was very reassuring (as per usual--happy to get those back!) Also pleased to see an official confirmation that there are a lot of Russian/Ukrainian bloggers moving over. Everything I'd seen so far seemed like hearsay.
(no subject)
Date: 7 Apr 2017 11:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7 Apr 2017 02:12 pm (UTC)Yeah, it's a bit involved, migrating your fannish existence. There's a fair amount of faffing about with control panels and shuffling around of people. But it genuinely does not have to be a difficult or dramatic thing. Once you've had a bit of time, living in between the two sites doesn't feel any more momentous than crossing the street--you just pop back and forth without thinking about it. I found reading other people's advice and resource lists from earlier exoduses exceedingly useful when I was doing it, so I'm happy to pass it on.
And the amount of migration that's been happening between the server move and the new TOS really is exponentially bigger than any earlier influxes I've seen. Some of these steps took years for me to feel comfortable taking just because of how many people were still on LJ exclusively, but I think for people coming in now it's gonna be a lot easier to feel settled a lot quicker.
(no subject)
Date: 8 Apr 2017 08:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8 Apr 2017 11:54 am (UTC)Yay
Date: 8 Apr 2017 10:42 pm (UTC)Re: Yay
Date: 11 Apr 2017 10:02 pm (UTC)Redecorating makes so much difference, even if it's a bit fiddly. Good luck!
(no subject)
Date: 9 Apr 2017 06:43 pm (UTC)I hope more people come to Dreamwidth. Yeah, giving up my icons will be awful when that time comes (I have extra userpic packages right now on LJ) and even 100 is going to seem like a paring-down, and the backgrounds here at DW are really not as varied or as pretty as on LJ, but I feel I must prepare for what may happen. Much less stressful to already have the hard work done if something happens!
Sometimes it seems like life on the computer is a constant 'do-over'. :)
(no subject)
Date: 11 Apr 2017 10:04 pm (UTC)Back ups and flexibility are always a good call! Good luck!
(no subject)
Date: 14 Apr 2017 08:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14 Apr 2017 08:57 pm (UTC)It's also worth noting that the limit on how much you can host on DW is still quite low--500MB--so depending on how much you have on LJ, you may not even be able to import everything right now. Though it sounds like they are eventually planning to expand that.
If you need an external hosting service, I've been using postimg.org for several months and find it exceptionally lightweight and simple to use. The account creation process consists of giving them an email address and then they email you a password. Literally that's it. Everything else is similarly straightforward and quick.
I have a ridiculous number of screencaps for picspams and other graphics over there, and the imported entries here just link back to the LJ content which is not going to work for the future.
I'm sorry. That sounds like it's going to be a huge pain in the butt. There may be other resources on doing what you're looking for in the resource posts I listed at the bottom of my post or in this comment, but I know if you import posts you have to manually go through and re-direct any links you have pointing to LJ pages. So I suspect you're gonna be stuck manually fixing images too.
(no subject)
Date: 14 Apr 2017 09:21 pm (UTC)I've got nearly a gig of images to download and host, and then the recoding nightmare begins. I've got reaction post picspams for each episode of a couple entire seasons of Supernatural with 20-120 ish screencaps each, and Sherlock reaction picspams that take up 3 to 8 LJ posts due to character limits, and they have 300-900 screencaps each. (Not that many people ever read any of them! XD)
I'm thinking after I get the images downloaded and resettled I'll pick away at the recoding over a very long time, and if anyone comments on one of the posts or asks for something to be fixed it'll go to the top of the list.
This is frustrating. I wish there was a way to go back in time and figure out a way to club together some funds and have fandom or OTW just buy Livejournal. I'm sure even the non fandom journals would be a lot happier under fannish overlords than what LJ has now. :-/
(no subject)
Date: 14 Apr 2017 09:28 pm (UTC)I genuinely love Dreamwidth and am so happy about how many people are finally moving over here. But the thought of how much of LJ history is just going to be lost in the transition is hurting me.
(no subject)
Date: 14 Apr 2017 11:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14 Apr 2017 11:48 pm (UTC)Bet it's the huge volume of LJ users jumping ship.
Anyway, any insight is appreciated. Thanks.
(no subject)
Date: 14 Apr 2017 11:56 pm (UTC)Hmmm. Importing the comments themselves takes quite some time (and a lot more time right now because of the volume of imports). Those comments come over after your entries are done importing. But once that's done I've never heard of claiming your open ID involving any delays.
Still, patience is probably the word of the day with any of these processes right now.
(no subject)
Date: 14 Apr 2017 11:58 pm (UTC)May I compliment you on your lovely layout? I especially like the banner up top.
(no subject)
Date: 6 Apr 2025 03:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7 Apr 2025 01:54 pm (UTC)