I like the look of
Dreamwidth so far. They have this purple sitescheme that is luscious, constantly makes me hungry, and keeps my checking my DW inbox every five minutes just to see the pretty, pretty purple. Yummy. They let OpenID users do a bit more than LiveJournal does, too, so I’ve been poking around there in
my pokitty.com guise and have ported a layout over, friended folks I know, and set up
a DW feed of my journal for my DW friends’ convenience.
Short version: DW is like LiveJournal, but far prettier, with all the 1999 cruft replaced by a clearer sense of where it should go, based on LJ’s history.
DW has a very nice separation of trust and reading: instead of a friends page, you have a reading page. When you want to add someone to that list, you’re given checkboxes to decide separately if you a) want them on your reading page and b) want to let them read your friends-only entries. It’s possible to do this on LJ with filters (and I do, couldn’t stand to lose my filters) but DW makes the whole thing straightforward.
Tabulas doesn’t have anything like filters, which is too bad. I can only add people to my friends list if I’m okay with them reading my friends-only entries. Tabs also has no communities, so any layout sharing communities are actually personal accounts. That can read your friends-only entries once you add them to your Tabulas friends list. Not good.
Luckily, all Tabulas sites have RSS feeds, so I add the layout “comms” to my Bloglines and follow them that way, but it feels like a work-around. I hope someday Tabulas separates reading and access, so I can add layout sites to my friends page without giving them access, or so I can grant access to someone whose posts I’m not interested in seeing on
my Tabulas friends page. Until then, viva la Bloglines.
I’m a little unsure how DW’s OpenID stuff will go. Evidently they’re letting OpenID users read friends-only entries, and they’re planning to let people read all their LJ/DeadJournal/InsaneJournal friends pages through the Dreamwidth site. That unnerves me, since I keep hearing about security flaws inherent in OpenID - it sounds like it has potential to expose friends-only data to hackers with a minimum of effort on the bad guy’s part. I wonder how it will actually pan out?
All the DW interoperability is making me realise how isolated Tabulas is. It’s very hard to find other Tabulas users that have things in common with you - there are no communities, no interests list in profiles, no blogrolls, no way to find a group of like-minded people. There are
the official Tabulas forums, but they aren’t the sort of place you can ask “Who else is into Super Nintendo?” and expect any sort of answer. Some days, I’d skin a cat* to get LJ’s interests feature cloned into Tabulas. I would list myself under things like “writing, reading, web design, web development, openid, Tabulas, ancient Egypt, cats, layouts, South Dakota, EarthBound, video games, Nintendo” - I am rambling so bad right now, but you get the idea.
I am going to blame my negativity on the local overcast blahs, and find something to do. Likely contenders are finding a versatile layout to port over to Tabulas or running through PHP.net documentation on array sorts.
Again. Someday, it’ll sink in. I hope.
(*not really, but it sounded good)
roy
roy
ree
