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03:31 pm - Ironic Fuzzies

Didn't fall sleep after all, which puts my evening plans in jeopardy yet again. Finishing up some mostly-written entries I had sitting around while I wait for the next spell of 'maybe I can fall asleep now' ...

Sometime after I started crossposting and realized that I couldn't use <lj user="XXXX"> to refer to people because that would generate a link to that username local to each site (which may or may not exist, and may or may not be the same human for each site on which the username exists), I posted a suggestion in the LJ suggestion area requesting that the syntax of that tag be expanded to be able to refer to 'foreign' users (e.g. to point to an IJ user in an LJ entry, or vice versa). AFAIK, LJ never did anything with it (please correct me if you know I'm mistaken). When composing an entry in my text editor^[1], I've been pasting in a chunk of HTML for a fictitious user named 'USER' on each site, and doing a global search-and-replace to substitute the name I want to use. (This is a bit more annoying when posting a comment via the web, since (AFAIK) the text-box thingie in my broswers has no search-and-replace feature, but fortunately it doesn't come up as often there because in comments I'm referring to folks on the same site I'm leaving the comment on, more often or not, but when posting an entry and referring to a *J user, they'll be a 'foreign' user on all but one of the sites the entry is crossposted to.)

Dreamwidth, wanting to facilitate cross-site functionality as much as is feasible, went ahead and implemented that feature right away, of course. That pleased me, because it seems like Right Thing designwise, but the irony is that I'm still not using it. Why? Because until all the other sites I crosspost to either (a) switch to using the DW software or (b) add that feature as a patch to the LJ software (unlikely unless LJ decides to add it, and even then some sites never upgrade to a newer release of the LJ code or take a long time to do so), I'm still posting each entries to a bunch of sites that lack the feature and only one that has it.

[ETA: denise reminded me that if I were using the crossposting feature built-in to DW, it would automatically expand the DW version of the foreign user tag to the same chunk of code I'm pasting in by hand as described above.]

I'm still glad they did it, and it'll come in handy ifwhen I need to refer to a non-DW user within a DW comment (likely to happen sooner or later). I'm just a weensy bit frustrated that even though someone implemented what I asked for (whether they got the idea from my suggestion or elsewhere^[2]), I don't get to really take advantage of it. (If anyone else is using that feature, my pleasure at their life being a wee bit easier because DW did the more-useful thing will exceed my frustration.)

[1] Are there Opera and/or Firefox settings/plugins/whatever that'll stick a version of vi in there whenever I click in a text-entry box? That would be convenient.

[2] I think they did get it from me, as, IIRC, one of the DW folks replied to my suggestion when I posted it on LJ -- but it's entirely possible (likely, even) that the idea occurred to several people independently (that is, I think it's "obvious" anyhow) and I was just the first (again, IIRC) to post it as a suggestion there ... and it doesn't really matter either way, as there's no glory in getting credit for seeing a need+solution that obvious. But in my own head I think of it as "my" feature simply because I spent so long wanting LJ to implement it and now it exists (so it's a minor source of warm fuzzies regarding DW, for me). Outside of my skull, any credit goes to the person who actually got around to coding it, methinks.