Karen

I have had a number of requests for Dreamwidth invite codes from people who (so far as I can tell) I've never spoken to or interacted with in any way before. I'm not annoyed with people for asking, as (1) generally asking questions isn't wrong and (2) at no point (until now) did I ever say 'only people who already know me', but I have decided that for the next period of time, until Dreamwidth beds itself down within my various social circles, I want to keep invite codes for friends/acquaintances/friends-of-friends. I currently have two invite codes. I am intending a relatively low barrier of 'know me' ie. have LJ account I may have seen commenting on other people's journals/have left me LJ comments etc rather than anything stronger but basically not anonymous/people I've never heard of before.

Dreamwidth have convincing reasons for the decision to use invite codes as a means to control site growth, however, the invite-or-pay-$3-to-get-an-account thing is something that is reminiscient of occasions when I've been the one excluded from a social group. Here I feel like I'm on the wrong side of the equation - I'm welcome here and other people are being sort-of-excluded* and while I accept the geek social fallacy that excluding people isn't always wrong, I think there's a way to go before the site will have grown enough that there will usually be people about with invite codes and most people will know someone able to invite them. For that reason, I do feel somewhat uneasy with deciding to prioritise friends/acquaintances over strangers, because I think getting people here who wouldn't otherwise be invited is a good thing. On the other hand, I don't think deciding to prioritise friends/acquaintances is illogical or in and of itself a bad thing. Of course my primary loyalty is to people I already know.

I will stop in passing to mention dw_codesharing where people with spare invite codes are offering them and there's a place for people who want invite codes to ask for them.

*I say sort-of-excluded because there's a social difference between a friend saying 'hi, come and join me doing x' and 'I'm doing x, if you pay $3, or go and comment in dw_codesharing you can come and do it too' - the access is there, but the social aspect of being explicitly invited to join in and welcomed isn't. [another note in passing - $3 probably is a barrier to entry for some people]. For people who have experienced a lot of exclusion in other settings, the internet is often a place where they find themselves usually welcomed and further experiences of being left out are unlikely to go down well, whether intended in this fashion or not.

I don't currently have any more invite codes for Dreamwidth. I'll let you know if/when I have more. In the meantime, try asking people who've recently created an account in a few days time, as they're likely to be issued with invite codes in due course. Or go and have a look at dw_codesharing/Dreamwidth codesharing.

reddragdiva/reddragdiva twittered earlier about No Script; an add on Firefox users can install to prevent websites running scripts without explicit permission. It seems that previously useful software is now being exploited for advertising gains:-( I don't currently have it installed and won't be installing it again until someone more technically competent than me tells me it's useful again or points me at an alternative.

I've just been through my Dreamwidth access list removing a lot of Open ID accounts. When I imported my friends' list from LiveJournal, something was broken and all of the communities and feeds I had on my LiveJournal friends list were given Open IDs. I intended to just remove those accounts, if I've removed you, it's from accidentally clicking the wrong box in scanning down a very long list.

Am thinking about setting up Google Analytics for this journal [ie. the one on Dreamwidth] 'cos it's a new feature to play with.

Is Google Analytics evil?

Anyone have any objections to me doing this, or any other comments?

I've spent much of the weekend playing around with Dreamwidth, after a friend gave me an invite code on Friday and I am very impressed indeed with what I've seen so far. My journal. I never squee - it's just not how I respond to things, but with this project I've been sitting in IRC watching the conversation and finding myself really wanting to offer to help them out with something. I'm excited about it. I can see it working well and I'm now a little bit apprehensive that having got myself so excited about it, it might not work out the way I think it will.

I'd have signed up for a Dreamwidth account without much persuasion anyway, on the basis of it being new and shiny and wanting to know what it does to see if I like it and because one of the people running it is rahaeli who was in charge of LJ Support when I did some volunteering there and I trust that she knows what she's doing. What I didn't expect was to find myself pulled towards it so strongly, so quickly.

Dreamwidth is a code fork from LJ - they've taken the LJ code and modified bits of it to make it better and fix annoying things. One of the key changes is splitting what LJ calls 'friends' into 'subscriptions' (journals you read) and 'access list' (journals who can read your protected entries). Conceptually I think this is better - you can want to read without allowing someone access to protected entries and want to allow people access to protected entries without wanting to read what they post. As a matter of social engineering I'm not sure how Dreamwidth will develop a culture around subscribing/granting access and desubscribing/removing access - I'd bet a small quantity of money that within certain subsections of Dreamwidth users there will still be drama associated with desubscribing/removing access, because people are people and some people will be upset that others don't want to read their entries/allow them access to their posts.

They've removed the nudge feature LJ introduced and all ad support from the code:-)

They've created an 'importer' so you can easily import journals from LJ & IJ and are working on a cross poster (so you can post to Dreamwidth and LJ at the same time).

Once the cross poster is working I will probably start cross posting entries for a while and see what happens. I plan on using LJ and Dreamwidth in parallel, with each friends page having its own tab in Firefox.

If you have an OpenID account and you have set and validated an email address on Dreamwidth you will get an invite code when it goes into open beta on 30th April. Until then, they're sending out a certain number of invite codes to OpenID accounts each day, as they try to build up the site usage between now and 30th April.

pthalo gave me an invite code to Dreamwidth, so I've created an account here and started subscribing to people/granting them access. Will add other people as I find them. I'm still planning on giving money to Dreamwidth though - they seem worth $25. I think I will eventually (once Dreamwidth is running well) remove people's LJ OpenIDs from my subscription list, so that I'm not seeing multiple copies of the same entries (ie. both on LJ and here).

I'm currently without my rainforest quilt icon, which somehow seems very 'me' as it's the one I've used more or less exclusively for years. I feel a bit odd using the one I'm using - it's a very clear description of one aspect of me, but not something I've talked about much on LJ recently and I feel kind of exposed in using it in a public post, even though it's been sitting quite happily on my publicly accessible icons page on LJ for years.

The importer imported my entries from LJ fine and also imported 6 of my 9 icons happily, but failed to import comments or the other 3 icons. I have submitted a support request as per instructions to do that if the importer wasn't working properly. I've downloaded a copy of my rainforest quilt icon to my computer, but can't get Paint to be cooperative at making it a sensible size (I haven't got round to installing Gimp or similar yet on this computer). Will try again in the morning.

In general I'd like to have some more icons. I've never spent the time learning how to edit images well or in coming up with good ideas for icons and don't really want to ask for help with this as it's something I should be able to do if I just spent a bit of time studying it.

While I have imported LJ over here, I haven't set up any filtered access groups yet, nor added anyone to the filters that were imported across from LJ, so you're not going to be able to see much here at the moment. I imagine I'll get round to sorting that out eventually, if people seem to be sticking around here for a while (as I think they will, but don't currently know).

AIUI things at the moment, it's not currently possible to restrict entries to a filtered access group at the moment.No - see denise's comment below. Recently, on LiveJournal I've been doing a lot of friends-locked and filtered posting as a consequence of being busy at work and buying a house and other stuff going on that's meant I've been less able to apply the kind of skill and care I need to give to stuff I'm intentionally putting on the internet clearly linked with my real name and that is highly googleable. I have a feeling Dreamwidth may be a place where I do rather more public posting.

EditI'm using Zesty White as a journal style at the moment. When I click on 'reply' the screen I go to doesn't give me the set of little icons to edit the entry/add it to memories/send it to a friend/track it. If I take away the ?mode=reply from the end of the url, a box containing those options appears under my icon. I wonder if that's a feature or a bug.

1. Can someone point me at a list of greasemonkey scripts useful for using with LJ?

2. Sort of related - does anyone have anything useful for automatically LJ cutting posts that are automatically fed to LJ from Twitter? [No objection to people ccing Twitter to LJ, but I only want to read it once not twice and I'll have usually already read it on Twitter]

3. What are your power management settings for your PC? Do you turn it off when you're out for the day/at night? Do you use some sort of suspend setting? What's better these days for computers - being left turned on or being turned on and off as needed? [Presumably energy saving wise we're now at the point where turning them on and off as needed saves energy]

4. If I were to want to grow vegetables in my garden, what can be grown successfully in big pots? I have a little bit of flower bed space, but not very much and am not very confident about any of this.

I now have internet access at home again. If you've emailed me anything before 14th March 2009, I no longer have it. If you've emailed me anything after 14th March expecting a reply, then I don't have it either, as there's currently nothing in my inbox awaiting response! Please resend anything you want me to see.

Am looking for a new cash ISA from 6th April 2009 as I now have a credit card with the Nationwide and they claim the right in their terms and conditions to use credit balances in other accounts to clear balances on credit cards if you don't pay the credit card bill. Whilst I'm obviously intending to pay my credit card bill, I don't like that as a condition and don't want to put more savings with the Nationwide until I no longer have a credit card with them.

Any recommendations?

[Yes I know how ISAs work, I want a cash ISA with instant access [might consider a short notice period], nothing more complicated. The interest rate isn't going to be great but it'll be better than my current account and tax wise I should be protecting my savings by putting them into an ISA]

Edit - Abbey Direct ISA (Issue 3) looks like a possible.

I currently have no internet access from home due to my computer breaking. If you want me when I'm not at work, please phone or text me. Contact details.

Can anyone access the Tesco Finance website? I've tried using Firefox and IE. They apparently have a savings account paying 6% interest, but I can't get to their website at all.

Happy new year. Hope 2009 treats you well.

What's the current geek take on Verified by Visa and Mastercard secure code?

I've now encountered Egg putting a block of some description on my card after I didn't sign up for Mastercard secure code while doing some online shopping a couple of weekends ago. I've now just tried to buy something else online and encountered a Mastercard secure code screen without a cancel function, got back to a screen to enter different card details and it took me to a verified by Visa screen.

I'm currently skeptical about the benefits of either scheme and don't see what else they add in terms of security and am pretty pissed off at retailers removing the ability to skip the screen. What do you think? Are they a useful security feature? Am I going to end up signing up for them on the basis of the process of least resistance in order to be able to do some shopping?

Yeah, I do like Strictly Come Dancing as Saturday evening entertainment. I've been quite amused by John Sergeant's performance, but have expected him to be voted off for the past couple of weeks. I think there was a tactical error on the part of the judges in being quite so rude to him; a better move would have been to ask for specific improvements and then point it out when he doesn't manage to make the changes asked for.

I think John Sergeant's choosing to leave the show now is a very savvy decision. The criticism he would have attracted had any of the remaining couples been eliminated instead of him would have been silly. Now he's leaving undefeated, having done wonders for his future career (yeah, I know he's retired from the BBC - he's probably still writing columns for newspapers and probably has an autobiography to write and sell). I can see his decision as gentlemanly and honourable but I think he's far too politically alert/aware after his career for the decision to be entirely from altruistic motives. I also think that as someone who has been a political correspondent for thirty years he's likely to be pretty thick skinned and thus not very suspectible to 'pressure' to leave.

What's amusing me most of all about this is the vehmence of people's opinions on the subject. I can hardly complain that other people are expressing an opinion online about it when I'm doing the same, but I'm in the 'mildly amused' category not in the 'righteous indignation' or the 'about time too' or anything like that. It is only a Saturday evening entertainment show, it's not all that important, though I do think someone with John's dancing ability shouldn't make it through as far as the 'serious' stages of the competition, because in the context of a competition between other people who're getting quite good at dancing it isn't far he wins.