>_> I had already made a note to do this in case there were people who were still new to LJ or RPing through LJ...and looks I really need to do it. So here we go! Crash course on working with LJ, from the setup, to how to make a post, and how to make a reply. I'm not going to go into every detail, but I'm hitting the important points. Once you feel comfortable I encourage you to explore the features, though, so you can get a better understanding of things.



§ Creating a Journal

First and foremost important step. You gotta have a LiveJournal account xD So how do we go about making a journal? Well that's relatively simple.

Go the main page and you should see a rather large box that has the large, green button "Create a Journal" underneath. Simply enter a 15 character long username of your choice and hit the button. It'll take you to another page where you fill out your e-mail address, password (must not have anything the same as your username and must have a number), birth date, and the retarded sometimes hard to read security code.

It will also tell you if the username is already taken (usually you have to start typing in your e-mail address and it sometimes doesn't do it the first time you try). If it is, just keep putting in one until you get one that's not empty.

Once you do that, hit the "Create Account" button.

Just follow the instructions (get the Plus account, unless you already know you want a Paid account), and you'll get to a small version of editing the Profile page.

Where it says name, it'll have the username already filled in it. Change this to either your nickname or to the character name if you are making a character journal. After that, fill in the fields with whatever you want. You don't have to fill in the bio or interests if you don't want.

Once you finish filling out the stuff with as much information as you want (you can always go back to edit), hit Done, Finish, or whatever that thing says, and an e-mail will be sent to your e-mail address which requires you to click on a link to verify the account.

Then you're done!


§ Customizing a Journal

Uh, you DON'T have to worry about this one so much since this only affects how your journal looks. If you want to spiffy up the journal so it fits your character, you can.

There are many pre-made layouts for you to choose from. To help make the search faster, select the check box that says "Only show themes available to me." This way, layouts made only for Paid accounts won't be displayed. Then you can either go through each subcategory one at a time or choose "All" to show them all at once. I usually like doing this and have it display all of the layouts on one page. It can take some time to load depending on the connection, but I can then just scroll all the way down and look at the layouts without having to do a lot of clicking and Back buttoning.

You can change the name/title of your Journal at the top (not hard to find) and then you can also customize your theme.

Basically, you can change the colors, how the entries are displayed, font type, etc. Don't worry about it too much if it looks very confusing. Just wait until you get the hang of using a journal before exploring the customizing section.


§ Uploading Userpics

We want a pretty picture when we post! So lets upload one! This is actually very simple to do ^^

Go to your "home" page for LJ (click on any link that says Home in LJ...not Home for your browser >_>) and you should see that you'll have a slew of tabs like "Home" "Journal" "Profile" "Communities" etc. Hover your mouse over "Profile" and the blue drop down menu should appear giving you more links to explore. You should already be seeing "Manage Userpics" and know what to do x3 Click it~

You'll open up to the Manage Userpics page and it should be pretty self explanatory. You can choose to either upload a user pic or supply the url of one. The Keywords field is for you to put in some words to help you remember what the picture is. It doesn't have to descriptive, a simple world like "Smiling" could work if something smiling in the icon. The Comment field can be left blank, but you can put anything you want in it. Usually if you found an icon that was made another LJ user or LJ community, you would use the LJ tags to give credit back. Up to you~


§ Posting

This shouldn't be too hard, but it can seem complex if you're already spazzing. You can either post an entry to your own journal or to a community. There are actually several ways one can post an entry.

If you notice, if you are viewing someone's journal or a community, there is a header bar at the very top of the screen. You'll see that there are links such as "Home" "Post" "Friends Page." You can post an entry via clicking on that "Post" link. If you are looking at your "Home" page, hover your cursor over "Journal" a drop down menu will appear and you'll see you have more options like to Post, Edit entries, etc. (Clicking on "Journal" well just take you to view your journal) Explore this bit when you feel comfortable, you'll find all these options very handing.

If you're looking at a community, and you are a member and have permission to do so, you may see a "Post to this Community." Clicking this link will make you post an entry into the community, not your personal journal.

Now for the actual posting.

You should be looking at a page with the title "Post an Entry" and you should see your user pic, fields/options next to it, and then giant box of where you type your entry. Now to explain some things , though most of it self-explanatory, I'm going to be thorough >_> (you'll find some of this useful to know in the future~)

Post as: this should display your username.
Post to: A nifty little menu. If your journal has access to a community, you can actually post to the community from here by clicking on the drop down menu and selecting the community or wherever else.
Date: Can't be that complicated, right? Wrong~ You can actually change the date of the entry. Depending on how you have your entries displayed (usually the most recent is on top), you can have an entry that's always on the top while any other entries will be posted below it. To do this, you must change the date so that's it in the future AND check the "Date out of Order" box. You must check this box whenever you're posting an entry that's set at a different date.
Userpic: Choose whatever userpic you want here~

Subject: Whatever you want to title the entry, you can leave it blank if you want

All right, now we have a little bit of a complication.

There are two to write your entry: Rich text or HTML. Rich Text is for people who don't know HTML and would need the buttons to help make things bolded and such. If you know HTML, or if you are copying and pasting something that uses HTML code, click on the HTML tab to switch.

Then you are free to type up your entry!

Tags: Tags are little keywords that you can associate your entry to make a sort of group. For example, in my main journal, any entry I make that deals with Dragon Knights will have the "dragon knights" tag. Whenever I click on the "dragon knights" tag, every entry that has that tag will pull up. These are very handy to help keep things organized (you'll notice that this entry has a tag!)
Mood: If you're not using a mood theme, don't worry about, but otherwise you can choose whatever mood fits you at the moment, or even type it in the box next to the pull down menu.
Location: Uh, if you want you put your location...this may be more useful when posting in the RP community. You could say your character is at a bar, so in the field you would just say "at a bar" or something.
Music: If you want to put whatever song is playing while you're typing an entry, you can fill it in.

The Tags, Mood, Location, and Music can be left blank if you wish.

Allow Comments? Keep it to default, though you can also specify and change it if you want.
Comment Screening: Screened comments are only viewable to you, so you can specify what groups of people will have their comments screened.
Adult Content: Mrrf. Don't worry about it unless you want to actually mark your entry as adult only (it makes it so accounts who are less than a certain age can't read it). Just Friend-lock (as in, make entry viewable to Friends only) for the RP.

Show this entry to: Three major options. Everyone (Public) means that anyone can view the entry and the replies. Friends means that only people on your friends list can see the entry. Private means that only you can see it. Anything that's mature rated should be Friends Only.

If you want to see how the journal entry will look like (check to be sure the format is right, nothing looks weird, etc), then click on the "Preview" button. It will open up in another window and how you how the entry will look like so if you see any errors you can find them and fix them.

Now just hit "Post" and you're done 8D


§ How to Comment

There two ways to comment:

You can comment to the entry via Post a Comment.

OR

You can reply to someone's comment by click on Reply to This that is usually linked under the person's comment. You can technically reply to any comment, not just the most recent one. But when RPing, unless you have more than two characters interacting, just reply to the later comment. If you're confused, don't worry. If you look at threads that will one day be made or look at another RP community, you'll see what I mean.

Read Comments just displays all the of the comments at once.

If you want to make a comment where it's blank and just shows the userpic, (like here), just type any random HTML tag like <i></i> in the comment box.

If you know you'll do a string of them, (like here), or even do a string of comments (one comment using one icon, and then another one using another icon), just put the number (#/#, so like 1/3 meaning 1 out of 3) in the subject line. If you don't know how many you're going to use, use a "?" (#/?, so like 1/? meaning 1 out of not sure) until you've finished. When you're on the last one either have the second number be the final number or type done (3/3 or 3/done).

By doing so, you'll be able to let the other player know that you're doing a series of replies and they won't accidentally reply before you finish.

If you mess up and need to delete a comment, just click on the red "x." Do not delete another player's comment unless given permission.

§ Threads

A string of comments is basically what a thread is. You'll probably notice that there is also a link that says thread under a person's comment. If you click on it, you will see that comment and any comments following it.

So if a thread is super long and you've already read like the first half, you can scroll down, guestimate, and click on a thread link and that comment onward will be the only things displayed.

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For how to use LJ codes and some basic HTML codes, go here.

Posted by: Laena