livejournal

= How to use Live Journal =

Live Journal is the website I use for 90% of my personal blogging. LJ comes with three types of accounts - basic, plus and paid. Basic is a limited type of account without a lot of bells and whistles. Plus provides some of the bells and whistles for a price - advertising on your blog. Paid has all the bells and whistles and no advertising - it's approximately US$40/year.

Creating an LJ account
First go to [|the Live Journal] website.



Their sign up procedure is a little more complicated than the Blogger one. Make sure you follow all the steps - on several steps there are little boxes that appear to the right of the sign up area that give more explanations.



Once you've filled everything in and clicked "Create Account" you will get a screen outlining the different type of accounts for you to choose from.



Click on Basic and then click "Submit."



The next page you go to will invite you to fill in a profile - this is something you can come back to at any time. You also have a choice of uploading a small picture file that becomes your avatar - or picture that will identify you and your posts.



Once you've updated your profile - or just clicked on "Save Changes" you will be able to go off and post your first message. You may get a message asking you to verify your email account.



Check your email and click on the link in the email to verify it - it's to make sure that you're a human not a 'bot' trying to cause havoc in the system.



Now it's time to create your first post. This is fairly straight forward and similar to that of Blogger - note the tags - think of them as being like a filing system - you can tag your posts and then later read all posts with the same tag - quite handy if you're writing a series of comments on a particular subject - check out my tags.



Usually they are in a list - this is called a 'cloud' view - you will see that some words are bigger than others - that's an indication that I've posted more messages under those tags - from my blog you can click on one of those tags and come up with all posts I've made under that tag. For example, [|my Milhouse tag] (family injoke)



Ok - once you've written your post, click on the "Post to ..." button at the bottom.



You will then get an 'Update Journal' and a link to view your post



You can then view your very first post. You can see a darker band across the top of your page. This is your navigation panel and from here you can 'Post to your journal.' As you become more confident in your posting you can start exploring other people's blogs. From there you can 'friend' them which means that when you click on the 'View my friends page' link at the top you'll be able to see the last days posts from all your friends.



Have fun exploring Live Journal. One of the cool features that I really enjoy is the Voice Posts that I can do as a paid account holder. Should you get to the point of wanting to explore that - please email me for further information.

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