DW for tumblrites part 5: I miss yelling in the tags! (subtext, icons, and moods)

[potofsoup]

[DW for tumblrites masterpost]

One of my favorite things about tumblr is all of the yelling that goes on in the tags. The stream-of-consciousness asides. The whispertext and the flailing. Sometimes entire ficlets get written in the tags. (And remember the days when the tags couldn't be reordered?)

So... how do you yell in the tags on DW?

Well, I guess, technically, you can still just do the yelling in the tags. Problem is, tags are actually properly sorted and counted on DW (more on that later), so you might not want to corrupt your tagging system.

Here are some other options:

1) Styling Text
A simple way is just by styling text differently. Use <small> or <s> to style text, and throw it at the end for good measure.* There's also <i> for italics, or even <font color="gray"> if you want to get even quieter. just remember to nest your tags and close them

2) Adding a comment to your own post
If you want to talk about something even further removed from the main topic of the post than usual, but don't want to create a separate post for it, you can throw it into a comment to your own post. I have two worries about this: (1) there's no good way of marking those comments as different, so people won't know that you were adding subtext, and (2) clicking on comments involves leaving the Reading Page.

That said, you can totally say something at the end of a post like "related yelling in the comments" and basically fork your own post via comments. I think it's a good way for when you have a whole other branching idea that you want to present.

3) Using the Mood box
There's a box for selecting or typing your mood, and that gets put at the bottom of the post. Sure, you can select some mood icons here (Organize->Customize Style->Display), but you can also just type some text in there. Pros of this is that it shows up in the same place as tags. Cons is that you're limited to 30 characters.

4) Using icons
This one is probably a bit weird for tumblrites, since we're used to having only 1 icon. On DW, people usually use icons to express different moods or situations. For example, if you're feeling yelly, you might use a yelly icon. Or if you are talking about a specific ship, you might use the icon for that ship. You can even choose icons when posting comments.

The fact that icon-picking is above the posting box, enabled with every comment, and factored into the paid tiers really shows that this is the DW-native way of expressing nuances of mood and providing an extra layer of subtext. (And RPers use icons to represent their characters!) When you click on someone's icon, you can see their entire icon set. (Try clicking on mine!)

Go to Create->Upload Icons to add new icons. graphics is a community where people share their icon sets, if you want to grab some pre-made ones.

Here are mine:


5. Cut tag
I think adding a additional cut at the end of the post is a good way to deemphasize what you're saying but also indicate something is there. I recommend putting the cut text as something small, like a period or an arrow.

---
> Like so. Now that I've tried all of these, I think I like the cut the most. It feels the closest to the real thing.

---------
* Footnotes are another good way. i've been using these for a while, and the smaller text helps but sometimes it's still not enough flailing

Comments

[neutralchaos]

Thank you so much for making these!!! They're really helpful to the DW illiterate like me XD

[potofsoup]

<3 <3 <3 (I'm learning a lot in the process, too!)

[perspi]

Most excellent!

[splinteredwinter]

Saving this! Somehow! Once I figure out the intricacies of saving what I like! *pulls hair out*

[potofsoup]

Click the little heart symbol at the bottom of a post! (It's called "Memories", and you can add 5 tags and find them again on your Profile!)

[splinteredwinter]

I did the thing!

[strategicadventure]

Thanks for these tutorials, they're so helpful! And these are great ideas for replicating tags. <3

[no_two_underscores]

thanks for this whole series!

[potofsoup]

<3

[hebethen]

Heh, it's really amusing/unnerving to me to read such an anthropological explanation of LJ/DW icon use :P

Using my yelly icon in honor of your example, even though I don't feel yelly.

I will note for any RPers making the transition that iconsets are considered very useful/fun/even essential for RP purposes as well!

[potofsoup]

What a great yelly icon! And thanks for the note about RP-ers! I added it into the post. <3

[mific]

<3

[capri0mni]

Also, if you want to write more about your mood than 30 characters will allow, there are also fields below that labeled "Location" and "music."

Whatever you type in those text boxes shows up at the bottom of your posts in tiny font. So you could have:

Mood: Frustrated
Current Location: The end of my rope.
Current music The roar and crackle of this dumpster fire...

Etc.

Still can't write novella-length flailing like you can in Tumblr tags, but it does give you a certain amount of room for sarcastic asides to the audience.

BTW. I like your icons!

[potofsoup]

Thanks! Yeah, I've been using Mood for the shorter ones, and just a double small tag for other ranting. I think it's really up to what people feel like. <3

[capri0mni]

BTW, jesse_the_k did a signal boost for this how-to series, here: How to do Dreamwidth: Immigrants get the job done (I love her collection of icons for mood commentary, by the way).

And in a comment thread with me, she said that Dreamwidth definitely does have fewer features, and they're the ones who appeal most to geeks who loved 1999.

...Which were precisely the people who built this place. So that's not surprising.

[potofsoup]

Ah, cool! Thanks for the link!

TBH, I don't think DW has fewer features, it just has a different set of features. The privacy controls and comment handling on DW is AMAZING. Privacy for everything, from comments to posts to images to tags to memories -- HOLY SHIT. And honestly, I think the internet needs more of that sort of privacy controls. Being able to search for blogs by tags is pretty awesome. Tumblr is designed for hype, and has a series of features that fit that need (easy and fast image handling, wysiwyg editor, tag search, etc). But I also think a lot of what we miss about Tumblr is actually a series of social norms, plus xkit. Yelling in the tags is a social norm. Posting images out in the open is a social norm. Reblogging is more tedious here on DW, but Very Doable. (I often comment on someone's post with "reblogging now!" and then I post a quick link). There are actually social norms on tumblr that I don't particularly enjoy (like the thing where your dash may be filled with 50 reblogs of the same thing), and I think a DW-style "reblog" fixes that problem.

[tinny]

Check out this post for an up-to-date list of icon comms:

https://icontalking.dreamwidth.org/642.html

Or a (current at the time of this post) list of icon comms:


icons
comicbook_icons - icons from comic book sources
dwrp_icons - avatar icons for role playing
fandom_icons
iconic
icon_library - icons from books and about reading books
smallbatchicons - only 5 icons at a time
walker_graphics - The Walking Dead icons and graphics

[aka_vamp]

Hi! This whole series is great, thanks for making it!

Can I just suggest that <*font color="gray"> isn't so good though. My theme background is grey (many theme backgrounds are dark) and I've had people's posts going invisible on my reading page when they do this.

Which makes me sad. I want to read all the words!

[potofsoup]

Ah, yeah -- theme choices definitely mess with that. I think the code solution (using translucent colors) is too complicated to broach in this tutorial and hard to remember, so... I'm not sure what the actual solution is to that. The "mean" solution is just to say -- if you find a gray chunk of text, either highlight it to read it (which adds to the sense of whisperspace), or click a bookmarklet that makes all the text white. But that puts all the onus on you. I'm not sure what is a good alternative. fwiw, I think most people are settling on the using of [small] for tag yelling???

[dawen]

this is all very good information, and I like the use of whisperyelling like this but I am somewhat stuck on...

(And remember the days when the tags couldn't be reordered?)

Yes, I do, and I'm sorry - we can reorder Tumblr tags now????