Dreamwidth Browser Tools

[flamebyrd]

I feel like a large flaw in Dreamwidth as a fandom platform right now, other than multimedia content, is that a lot of the site (non-user pages, like profiles and inbox) still has poor mobile support. Unfortunately, there isn't anything I can do about that.

So! For those who use desktop browsers, are there any annoyances a bored fan with Javascript skills can fix with a bookmarklet or userscript?

Here's a couple of things that have occurred to me:
- Is there an existing, Dreamwidth-supported "Post to Dreamwidth" bookmarklet like the old one for LiveJournal? It pulled the selected text on the current page and a link into a new entry for you. I was thinking this could ease some of the frustration about the lack of reblogging.
- On the same principle, I've made a proof of concept for a bookmarklet that will take all the images you've just dragged into the Upload Images page, and create a new post for you: Dreamwidth Image Post Bookmarklet. Currently it just uses the code Dreamwidth automatically generates for you, ie. a 100x100 pixel thumbnail with a link to the original image. Obviously this isn't very practical for the modern web, but making it configurable will come in v0.2.
- If you're using the Beta New Entry page and are missing rich text controls, I can't help you, but if you just want buttons to insert HTML for you, I have this script: Dreamwidth HTML Buttons Userscript.

I'm also working on a post with some tips for tweaking your journal theme custom CSS for better mobile display (but please let me know if someone else has already done this).

Comments

[snickfic]

Ooh, that image post bookmarklet looks super useful.

IDK if you could help with this or would want to tackle it, but I've always been frustrated that ALL the DW layouts I can find all take up a lot more vertical space than the default LJ ones did. For example, there's one full screen of my LJ:


And here's one full page of my DW:


If you have any for-dummies suggestions for how to tweak CSS to make a layout more compact, I would love to hear them. (But keeping in mind my CSS experience is minimal.)

[flamebyrd]

Hmmm. Assuming I'm understanding correctly, I think in this case you're best fiddling with the line-height. Try adding the following to https://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/options?group=customcss


.entry-content, .comment-content {
line-height: 1.35;
}


If you also want to mess with the white space at the top and bottom of the entry/comments, put this in instead:


.entry-content, .comment-content {
line-height: 1.35;
margin: 1em 0;
}


[cesy]

Grabbing code from the Mobility theme may be useful for making themes more mobile-friendly?

And Momiji is looking for more people to help make existing official themes more mobile-friendly with CSS.

[flamebyrd]

Thanks, I'll check out Mobility! The post is not really progressing because I'm really not sure how to address the number of different themes available and it will require a lot of research. So it may not end up happening.

Ah, my AO3 volunteering experience was not good for my mental health so I'm hesitant about dipping my toes into another one :/ (Plus I'm not sure who Momiji is?)

[cesy]

Yeah, there are huge numbers of themes. momijizukamori is a volunteer who's been working on improving the official styles to make them more mobile-friendly, and will know what's already in progress and what needs help.

But yeah, totally get that around volunteering, and Dreamwidth does have some issues in volunteer management as well.

[morbane]

That's a very kind offer - I have mentioned it over in the Yuletide discord.

[flamebyrd]

Thank you! I joined the Yuletide Discord a while back but found it overwhelming, and I haven't tried to get back to it yet. But feel free to @ me there if there's anything you want me to see.

[hlagol]

I definitely think that work on mobile-compatible site and journal themes (rather than an app or something more involved) would be broadly loved, particularly by the new influx who haven't been here and gotten used to things as they are currently. Whether that's css tips, purdy layouts for dreamwidthlayouts or something I can't tink of.

Also maybe some sort of "find dead journals" tool that would scrub community and journals links on a user profile and return/highlight those that have not been updated in X days.

[jesse_the_k]

+10000 for this. Every time I look at my circle, I grown re: all the cruft.

[flamebyrd]

Sorry, the weekend happened to me for a bit there! I'm thinking about your script suggestion and will probably work on it this week - I'm a little concerned about undue stress on DW's servers, but I think if I slow it down a little it should be okay.

[hlagol]

You make a fine point - could easily be 500+ simultaneous calls for some of the busier folks on here. Wouldn't want to burn the house down!

Hope the weekend happened in a pleasant way :)

Thanks for prompting this interesting discussion in the first place!

[flamebyrd]

Yes, exactly! Although if we assume the alternative is opening them all in tabs all at once, a script could actually be more gentle...

I'm thinking a bit about UI - was your vision that there would be a (configurable) cutoff date, and everything that hasn't been updated since before then would be highlighted in some fashion? Or would it better to produce a report of some sort - no config, just "journals updated in last six months/year/3 years/5 years/etc"?

[hlagol]

A configurable date might be nice, but I imagine an arbitrary 30days/3months/1year type of dropdown selection range would probably satisfy the 80% of use cases and means no godforsaken datepickers :)

I suppose a report might help alleviate pressure on the server if it was queued then emailed (though that gets into either manual notification email input or authentication tokens I'm assuming, both of which are messy in their own way).

My intuition is that utility would be highest with the result being a list of (clickable) links to dead journals, for un-subscribing purposes.

This seems to either mean highlighting links on the actual profile page (kinda like so) or generating a report (and doing some fun JSON to HTML transformation, or whatever this perl-y site gives you) and then sending an email with links to the requesting user.

Kinda makes the page highlighting seems like the easier choice, the more that I think about it.

[flamebyrd]

Oh, yes, sorry, I was a bit ambiguous there - by "report" I was just imagining it popping open a new window with the content of the report. Definitely with clickable links though!

I actually had a bit of a dig through the lingering LJ API documentation, but it doesn't seem like I can pull the "last updated" information through it, so I'm limited to what's on the profile page (and Javascript, my old frenemy).

What I'm imagining now is a bookmarklet that you click when you're on your profile page, and it goes through your subscriptions/access and pulls their last updated date from their profile page, then highlights them according to how long ago that was. (Or alternatively the ordered list popping open in a new window.)

[hlagol]

Yeah, your third paragraph sounds totally logical!

[flamebyrd]

Ahh, I'm afraid I have some bad news! I was trying this out today and discovered I forgot to take into account that Dreamwidth uses subdomains for all journals, which (due to browser security features) means none of my functions for fetching the content of another user's profile page work.

I don't think there's any way for me to work around this (although I'd be thrilled if anyone has suggestions!), so I'm putting this project aside for now.

[hlagol]

Ah, that makes sense. No worries, and thanks for taking a crack in the first place!

[solarbird]

I was working with dev staff until a bit over a year ago, when outside things happened on their side. (I'm hoping we can pick this back up.)

Here is a fairly comprehensive fix for mobile. Seriously. It only works on Neutral Good (and Evil) on Practicality, because that's the system default, but it works on mobile and desktop both, because it's responsive CSS.

Coexistence Alpha: a mobile-friendly CSS patchset for Neutral Good - v0.842 BETA 1

Pure CSS. Apply, set your style to override everything else and it fixes everything your custom CSS can reach.

It's still a beta but I haven't had a lot of bugs reported.

[flamebyrd]

Thank you! I think after all the info I've received I'm pretty satisfied that people who are better at both writing text and code have this covered, so I don't need to do my own writeup and muddy things. Thanks for your hard work :D

I'm actually pretty happy with my own DW layout on my phone - my primary concern is the CSS that users can't touch, on the inbox and profiles and so on. So hopefully that's coming!

[solarbird]

I know, right? It so needs to happen!

The good part is that DW is open source, so... I'm hoping as things rev up here that more on that will happen again. I'm already signed up to help, I just need them to be able to... accept it? Something like that. ♥