Welcome to Dreamwidth!

So, you've decided to move your card post to Dreamwidth. You're in luck! Dreamwidth works quite a lot like LJ used to—you know, when LJ worked. That said, a few things are different! This guide should help make the transfer process swift and painless. Please feel free to come forward with any questions, concerns, or issues you may have, and I'll do my best to help.

Getting Started

So you've registered a shiny, new, and very empty journal. But your LJ has years of content on it, and you want to access that content easily! No worries. Follow these steps, and your LJ will be imported to your DW.

Click Organise > Import Content.

Choose which service to import from—probably LiveJournal!

Enter your LJ's username and password where indicated. DW will not store this information, though your browser may ask if you want it to remember your password! There's no need to do so; you won't need your LJ password again.

Note! If you enter your LJ password incorrectly, you will need to start the process over.

Once you click continue, you will be brought to this screen. Tick the boxes to indicate what you'd like to import. It's easiest to import everything and muddle around with it afterwards than to import select things and have to repost others. Note that some content is linked together, and importing any of it will require you to import the related content. For example, to import entry comments, you must import entries.

The next and final screen is the confirmation, just so you can review all your selections. Make sure it's accurate, because you cannot reverse an import!

Now the waiting begins. If you have a lot of content in your LJ, it may take a few hours for the transfer to complete. Be patient, and keep an eye on your DW Inbox for notifications.

And you're done!

!Importing a community? The process is almost identical, except the LJ username and password you enter must correspond to an administrator of the community you're importing. Furthermore, you must import from community to community; you cannot import a personal journal's contents into a community or vice-versa.

Claiming Your LJ Account

After importing, you may notice that comments have been left by whoeveriam.livejournal.com, rather than by your new account on DW. Imported comments left by your LJ account won't have images in them or any icons attached to them. That's confusing! To clarify the situation, you can claim your LJ account and link it to your DW account. Here's how:

To make this easier, first make sure you're logged into the account you're going to link with on LiveJournal.

The FAQ related to this topic is here. Click the Claim OpenID Account link to get started.

Enter the URL of your LiveJournal. For example, mine is http://cruxis.livejournal.com. Then, click Claim Account.

Note! Be aware that when you claim an account, all of its comments become your comments. All of my cruxis comments became comments left by shinsengumi. Any other user or community importing comments left by cruxis will now see them as being left by shinsengumi. You cannot undo this procedure!

You will be forwarded to LiveJournal and asked to permit the linking. Allow it.

You will return to Dreamwidth, and all comments left by your old LJ account will now read as having been left by your DW account. Congrats, you've dealt with the major transferring issues!

Intermission: DW Code

Are you a fan of LJ's rich text editor? Fear not—that same option is available on DW! If you don't use, don't like, or just don't know code, the rich text editor will fulfill all your needs admirably.

As a rule of thumb, drop the LJ-prefix on all the LJ-specific codes you used to know! Used to lj-cut? Now use cut instead! Check out these bits of the FAQ for more information. Note that you can link to another website by using the tag user name="username on site" site="site linked to". It turns out like this: ivywell.

Generally, you need to use inline CSS to style entries on DW. That sounds more complex than it is—many aspects of HTML are easily translated into CSS. Check out these two references for some of the new things you can do, and new ways to do old things you used to be able to do!

Updating Your Profile

Take note! Profiles on DW are geared towards accessibility for all parties, which results in them stripping away quite a lot of HTML and CSS coding. Some good rules are to avoid tables—use divs instead—and forget entirely about vertical alignment. Keep things simple! Check the first half of this guide for some workarounds.

Remember to update your profile's links if they were pointing to LJ entries, as they're all imported to DW now.

Updating Your Layout

Browse through DW's premade layouts. They come in a variety of colours and shapes and can be messed with to your liking.

Do you really need a Flexible Squares or Smooth Sailing layout, with custom CSS from LJ? Okay, follow this tutorial! Carefully—it's a great tutorial but this business can be complicated.

And that's everything! Hopefully DW seems a bit less daunting now. After all, we knew how to use it when it was LJ.

Dreamwidth: New User Guide