Getting Started with Dreamwidth

DW features: Comment tracking, Custom circles, RSS feeds and replying from email

2026-10-21T17:54:30Z

Posted by: prettyarbitrary

It's me again! With how-tos on more cool DW features. (I think they're cool.)

Comment Tracking:

My personal favorite--I consider it the secret sauce of Dreamwidth (and LJ before it)--post tracking! You can use this to get notified when your favorite bloggers make new posts. But you can also CRUCIALLY use it to get notified when people leave new comments on a post you like.

So if you got dug in on a cool conversation in the comments, you can turn that on and get notifications whenever somebody leaves another reply. This lets you stay in the conversation without keeping the post open in a browser window or something. You can add a blog or post to your tracking at any time using the little bell/track this icon at the bottom of each post. You can manage your post tracking in Account Settings > Notification tab. (Also the place to go to adjust your notification settings generally.)

Create Custom Access Circles & Custom Reading Pages:

Another super useful trick, if you're somebody who likes privacy and the ability to lock your posts to certain users, is the ability to create custom access circles. On DW, you always have the ability to set posts to public, private or 'access locked' (this means people you have followed/friended). But you can also create custom access lists! So perhaps you have one for 'besties I trust with information about my mental health.' Or one for 'beta readers for my rough drafts' or 'people who opted into my obsessive posting about kpop.' You create and manage these Custom Access Groups or Custom Circles in your Account Settings > Manage Circles. Create and name one, and then add the people you want in it. Or remove people who you've blog-divorced.

As a bonus, a Circle also includes a custom reading page. So along with using them for custom blog post access, you can also use them to create specialty reading pages--maybe 'people who write weird fic,' or 'my fiber arts friends.' AND you can set those reading pages to be public or private, so that if you don't want people to know you have a weird fic reading page, you can hide it.

Subscribing to RSS feeds or, Did you know you can follow Tumblr blogs from your DW reading page?

Another super cool one: You can add RSS feeds to your Dreamwidth reading page. So you can follow people who post on Tumblr or Twitter or Bluesky. You can follow people's personal off-site blogs. You can follow news feeds from various sites--maybe you're into AP's Finance section or you want to be able to track new fics posted to your favorite AO3 fandoms. Here's the how-to of creating and following RSS/Atom feeds on your Dreamwidth. (Edit: now with 100% more actual link!)

Post to Dreamwidth via email

In your Account Settings > Mobile, you can set up the ability to send emails to Dreamwidth to make posts or reply to comments. Nice if you don't feel like logging in. If you're like me and you lurk in your email a lot, you can have DW notifications set to send you emails as post or comment notifications and then reply to them straight from email.

Crossposted to newcomers, pillowfolks

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Communities: setting up & administering

2011-12-26T15:51:21Z

Posted by: zellieh

I've set up[ a comm. I've set myself up as mod/administrator. I've set up my email to receive notifications. I've set up a co-mod with administrator privileges. So far, so good.

How do I set up email notifications for both me and my co-mod? Can I do that, or does my co-mod need to do it?

I've seen instructions in the FAQ for how to set up as a solo mod, pass all the modly duties on when you want to give up modding, but not how to share modding duties. Please help!

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Why do I not get email notifications...

2011-07-12T18:05:00Z

Posted by: takes_a_fairy

...when someone puts up a new post. I get the comment notifications and all, but not those. I've checked my settings as best I know how.
Maybe there is some special little setting tweak that I'm unaware of?

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Notifications of crossposting

2010-05-06T10:26:22Z

Posted by: mizubyte

I checked under the tags for crossposting and notifications and didn't see anything about this. Is there any way to opt-out of the notifications that my entries were crossposted to LJ?

Edit to clarify: sorry I meant, the email in my DW inbox that told me my entry was being crossposted. is there any way to just, not get those emails?

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Birthday Notifications

2010-04-29T07:52:03Z

Posted by: dancing_serpent

Is there a way to opt out of the birthday notifications? I don't mean not having them sent to me, but keeping DW from notifying people about my birthday.

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notifications for comments in communities

2010-03-17T18:40:56Z

Posted by: dhobikikutti

Argh! I could have sworn this was an option but I can't find it. Tell me I'm not on crack?
Is there a way for an administrator of a community to have all comments posted in the comm mailed to them, without having to track comments on each individual post?

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Notification problems

2009-08-16T14:57:34Z

Posted by: angelikitten

This might not be the right place to ask, but I've no idea where the right place is :(

Last night, comments started appearing in my inbox in addition to being emailed to me. I searched through the FAQs and it said something about how this being a side effect of how the notification system works. It seems to be the same thing that's started happening at livejournal, only when there it's stopped sending me any and all notifications of replies to posts that I've made in communities.

So my questions are:

a) If this is how the system works, why has this only just started happening?
b) If this is a recent change, will it have the same effect on community comments as it has on livejournal?
c) If it does have that effect, how can I fix it? I don't care whether I get notifications through emails or the inbox, but I do really need some form of notification because of my memory problems.
d) Does any of this make any sense, or am I the only person who's worried about any of this?

Thanks for any help you can give me. If I don't reply to anyone here within the next 24 hours, assume that the community comments thing is a problem XD

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Notifications

2009-04-24T15:39:15Z

Posted by: idlerat

I didn't want my DW inbox to keep filling up with comment notifications, so I reset my notifications preference. I still wanted comment notifications in my email, and the "notifications" preferences thingy only mentioned DW inbox, so I thought I'd still get them. But then I realized that I had missed at least one comment, which didn't show up in my email, so I changed back.

Is there a way to get comment notifications in email but not in DW inbox? Because I would rather save that for circle updates and personal messages and so on- I think of comments as part of my general correspondence, not DW business.

Thanks everyone and good luck this week!

(I meant to post this here and posted to dream_chasers by mistake - sorry!)

ETA: For those driving by, the answer to the question is "No, it's not possible due to site architecture." In other words, to get comment notifications, leave the preference turned on in Manage Account. There is a built-in filter in the Inbox to let you separate comment notifications from circle updates and messages. Thanks to DW folks, again.

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G Mail Threading

2009-04-15T22:20:15Z

Posted by: zvi

I know a lot of people get their dreamwidth comments sent to gmail and a lot of us are unhappy that the threading is not the relatively simple issue it is on LJ.

The only workaround for the issue at the moment is to add subject lines to your comments. That doesn't make the threading work completely right, but at least it means you won't have 40 message 'conversations' from 10 or 12 different DW entries.

If you can't think of a subject line, why not just repeat the subject line of the entry you're reading? If the entry you're reading also does not have a subject line, just repeat the first line of your comment.

I've been trying it for the past couple of days, and it is better. (Not perfect, because I haven't gotten in the habit 100% yet.) But it's better.

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