Metamorphosis complete

Well, it is done. The results of my poll suggested that most of you like it, and I certainly do. So purple_pen is no more, and strange_complex has taken her place.

It felt a bit weird immediately after I'd done it. I was expecting it to maybe take a couple of hours to go through, but as soon as I'd paid up and returned to LJ, there it was - my username of seven years had unceremoniously vanished from its old home in the menu bar at the top of the screen, and some new name had appeared to take its place. It was hard not to feel deleted, kicked out and body-snatched for a moment, there. But I think I've pretty much got the hang of it already. It's like a brave new world. With, um, exactly the same stuff in it.

You, gentle reader, should be largely unaffected. All my friends contacts are exactly the same, and even if you forget my new username and type in <lj user=purple_pen> by accident, it will display as strange_complex. I think you should also find that every comment I've ever made, or every reference you have ever made to me in the past, has also been changed to show strange_complex as the username. So all you have to do is remember that that is the same person who used to be known as purple_pen.

Now I am off to round off the process by replacing my journal header, figuring out how all this has affected my OpenID (the official word is that it's anyone's guess), and also seeing whether LJArchive will be affected. Have a strange and complex morning!

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OpenID consequences - will need access regranting by DW users

Before I changed my LJ username, I wondered what this was going to do to the old OpenID presence based on it which I had on Dreamwidth. Nobody knew for sure, so in the end I decided to find out by just doing it and seeing what happened.

I can now report that the answer is that I have lost control of the old OpenID, and have been allocated a completely new profile by Dreamwidth. Even if I try to log in as "purple-pen.livejournal.com", the system interprets me as "strange-complex.livejournal.com". No-one else can get into it either, so it isn't a security risk. It is just an orphan identity which I can no longer access.

That's not particularly troublesome to me, because I didn't have a particularly highly developed Dreamwidth presence anyway. I had used the old OpenID for occasional commenting, a handful of DW users had granted it full access to their journals, and one person had used it to subscribe to my LJ from her DW reading page. I've effectively lost all those connections now, but since there weren't that many of them, I will live.

But obviously for people with a more highly-developed OpenID-based Dreamwidth presence, losing it all because they had changed their LJ name could be a major pain in the ass. So I'm writing this post about it partly so that it can be used as a reference-point for anyone in the future wanting to know what will happen to their OpenID if they rename their livejournal.

I'm also writing this because I am going to need to ask anyone who wants me to be able to see and comment on their friendslocked DW content, or anyone who wants to read my LJ from DW, to re-grant me access to your DW journal or re-subscribe to me as appropriate.

In practice, I think the only DW journals I've ever actually commented on are miss_s_b's and matgb's - and I see that miss_s_b has already updated her access / subscription links, so thank you sweetie! But for the record, these are the other DW users who had previously granted me access to their journals:

• ashavah
• dadi
• gylfinir
• katsmeat
• lefaym
• matgb
• mia_oia
• moominlou
• mother_bones
• nmg
• nwhyte
• swisstone

If those people, or indeed anyone else, want me to have OpenID access to their DW journals, could you please update your permissions? Thanks! :-)

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