Getting started on Dreamwidth doesn't have to be overwhelming: you can take it as quickly or as slowly as you'd like. Here are three steps to getting the most out of your new Dreamwidth account.

Decorate Your Journal
Find Stuff to Read
Post!

Here at Dreamwidth Studios we truly believe in what we're doing and genuinely think we're offering something special.

This guide introduces us and explains what we stand for.

General Information
Open Source
Open Operation
Open Expression
Getting Involved

Although Dreamwidth Studios is based on the LiveJournal code, we've made a lot of changes to it. In this guide, we'll be outlining some of the changes that we've made and explaining what tools we have to help you move your journal here.

Creating an Account
OpenID
Subscribe/Access
Terminology
Tags and Markup
Site Icons
Navigation Strip
Importing
Style System
Crossposting
What's Missing?
Official Communities

This guide covers how to keep your Dreamwidth journal private and secure. Part 3 tells you how to make sure that your account is secure. It's very important to be familiar with its contents. Part 2 explains what a public security level means, what information on your Dreamwidth journal is always going to be public, and who can see your public information. Part 1 tells you how to make your Dreamwidth journal as private as you possibly can, if that's what you want to do.

Part 1 - How to be as private as possible
Part 2 - What "public" actually means
Part 3 - Protecting your account's security

There are a lot of HTML tags you can use in your Dreamwidth posts and comments. Here are the most commonly used tags and some examples to get you going.

Link: <a href...

This tag inserts a link to another web page. For example, to insert a link to https://dreamwidth.org that will show up with the text "Dreamwidth" use this syntax:

<a href="https://dreamwidth.org">Dreamwidth</a>

The link will display like this:

Dreamwidth

Bold: <b> or <strong>

These tags will bold the text within the tags. For example:

Ordinary text, <strong>strong text</strong>, <b>bold text</b>

Displays like this:

Ordinary text, strong text, bold text

Italic: <i> or <em>

These tags will italicise the text within the tags. For example:

Ordinary text, <em>emphasised text</em>, <i>italic text</i>

Displays like this:

Ordinary text, emphasised text, italic text

Quotes: <q> or <blockquote>

Use these to quote portions of other people's text. <q> is for short quotes that display in your paragraph text, <blockquote> is for longer quotes that display in a paragraph of their own. For example:

This paragraph includes a <q>short quote</q>, but <blockquote>longer quotes are displayed in their own paragraph block</blockquote>

Displays like this:

This paragraph includes a short quote, but

longer quotes are displayed in their own paragraph block

Newline: <br>

Use the <br> tag to indicate a new line starts at that point. Usually Dreamwidth is good about guessing this but if it guesses wrong, or if you select the "Don't autoformat" option for your comment or entry, then you can use this to indicate a new line. For example:

This is the first line<br>This is the second line

Displays like this:

This is the first line
This is the second line

Paragraphs: <p>

Use the <p> and </p> tags to enclose a paragraph of text. Usually Dreamwidth is good about guessing this but if it guesses wrong, or if you select "Don't autoformat" for your entry or comment, then you can use these tags to indicate the start and end of a paragraph. For example:

<p>Paragraph one.</p> <p>Paragraph two.</p>

Displays like this:

Paragraph one.

Paragraph two.

Other HTML

There are many other HTML tags you can use in your entries or comments, such as:

• Font styling tags: <big>, <del>, <font>, <s>/<strike>, <small>, <sup>, <sub>, <tt>, <u>
• Text type tags: <code>, <pre>, <dfn>, <kbd>, <marquee>, <pre>, <samp>, <var>, <xmp>
• Heading tags: <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6>
• Table tags: <table>, <th>, <tr>, <td>, <tfoot>, <thead>, <tbody>, <caption>, <col>, <colgroup>
• Semantic markup tags: <div>, <span>, <abbr>, <acronym>, <address>, <cite>

Some of these tags may not display the way you're used to them displaying. This is because we use a "CSS reset" to strip formatting from many tags, in order to make the site display properly in all browsers. You can add the styling back to those tags using inline CSS.

There are also some Dreamwidth-specific markup tags you can use — for instance, to link to other users or to put some of your entry behind a "read more" cut.