Newbie bumbling along...

[redcirce]

Hello, I'm one of the many making the mass exodus due to the issues over at LJ currently. I did have some questions, though, that hopefully someone might know the answers to?

1. Firstly, (and this might answer the rest of my questions, honestly) I saw a page a few days ago that clearly laid out the differences between LJ and DW (i.e. which features were where). It definitely was NOT the official one in the DW FAQ (much more detailed). Has anyone else seen this, or something similar?

2. Is there anything on DW similar to the "notes" features on LJ? I find it really helpful in keeping track of people, but I'm not seeing anything in "Settings". I may be looking in the wrong place.

3. AT LJ I can modify subscriptions to my friends/comms and keep certain tags I have no interest in in showing up on my flist. So, opt out of tags, not opt in. Is there a way to do that here? (maybe in the "filters" section?) I looked in the "Mange your Circle" section, but I'm not seeing anything.

4. (This may be a really stupid question, JSYK) I won a charity auction a while back and had someone write me a layout for LJ that I like very much. I was thinking of trying to learn the code and modify it for here. However, a big part of the layout is a wide top banner image typical of LJ (that randomly rotates between a group of images). I've noticed that I haven't seen any wide top banners here at DW- is that not possible with the style set up here? I'd be nice to know if I'm doomed to failure before I try to modify the code.

5. Is there any option to get a tag selector on entries? I use that a lot, especially for comms.

(I use Firefox, btw, in case there are any neat scripts that solve any of this.)



Sorry if these are all questions that have been asked a bazillion times. I am working through the FAQ but it's taking a while...

LJ entries won't import? Is your LJ really old? Try this.

[sepdet]

 I've been trying to import my old LJ, which stretches back to the end of 2002. I finally figured out why I kept getting import failures.

 [[ETA: This error may appear if you were using accented characters (for instance, Tolkien's Elvish) in your LJ 8 or 9 years ago.]]

If you have a really, really old LJ, and your import fails, here's something to check.

• Go to your Dreamwidth inbox. Look for the following error message:

Your entries have failed to import and will not be retried.

XMLRPC failure: Client error: Invalid text encoding: Cannot display this post. Please see http://www.livejournal.com/support/encodings.bml for more information.

• If you get "invalid text encoding," this could mean your Livejournal is so old that the early entries are using a different text formatting system; nowadays Livejournal uses Unicode. Nevermind what that means... here's how I fixed it.
• WHAT TO DO: Go to http://www.livejournal.com/settings/?tag=encoding
• There's a couple of pulldown boxes, and they're probably blank. Change both to "Western European (Windows)"
• Save.
• Hopefully, this will update the text encoding on all your ancient LJ entries so they'll be in a format DW can understand.
• NOW try importing on DW again. 

I am not a technical guru, so if that doesn't work, go to Dreamwidth Help/Support for more troubleshooting. (That link is on your DW Home page, upper right.)