Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
On Dreamwidth
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2010 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I have an account on Dreamwidth, a social blogging service. It's neat! I can watch the Latest Posts scroll and see people writing interesting things. Who's hit hardest by the recession? What is fanfic for, and what can it be? Bleahs and yays, fanfic, pretty pictures, exasperated thoughts on education, and only a tiny bit of random childish spew. Dreamwidth is rather a place for people who make things, and it's good for me to virtually hang around people who make things, as the ambient role models/expectations/examples will inspire me when I'm waffling.
And they have the basics right, too: there's an active open source community around the DW codebase, DW is committed to outstanding openness principles and sticks to them, and the whole community is very woman-friendly.
If I post anything there, I'll link back to it here. If you've been looking for a free, friendly place to start blogging (Brandon, Dorée, and Jade spring to mind), here are some invite codes to start a free Dreamwidth account:
FNG6KDTSB44XDAAADYZU
9EH8VC2Y85KTMAAADDNR
QR27YMWHM2MF6AAADDNS
[A longterm goal of mine is to unify all the publicly accessible stuff I emit on the web into a metablog -- a lifestream or firehose, some people call it. Twitter (which is a copy of my Identi.ca microblog), my MetaFilter activity, and of course twenty comments a day on other people's blogs -- I'd like to have a unified feed of all those. Suggestions/tools welcome.]
Comments
Paul Wright
http://www.noctua.org.uk/paul/
23 Mar 2010, 17:57 p.m.
The various feeds I supplement my LJ with come from little bits of Python: the comment feed comes from munging the output of the backup tool for my LJ; the feed of my comments on other people's journals comes from parsing the mail LJ sends me with my own comments in (paying user feature, I think); the regular postings of my del.ico.us bookmarks are another script which grabs the RSS feed and munges in into an LJ posting; and so on.
Mark Pilgrim's feedparser is your friend. There's also this thing called Beautiful Soup which you may have heard of (that's doing the HTML email->feed conversion for "my comments on other people's posts").
I'd like to track my comments on other blogs. I tried out Cocomment, but it installed an extension which fetched Javascript from their server and injected it on every page I visited and my Mom got scared. So I uninstalled that. There ought to be a better way, but I don't know what it is.