reading in lantern light

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