fandomhigh_ooc | Tips and Tricks for a Better RPing Experience!

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Tips and Tricks for a Better RPing Experience!

Livejournal, while sometimes confusing, offers a lot of customization options to make your journal look the way you find most appealing. Of course, you just have to know where to look. So, we’re here to offer a few tips and tricks that you may not know!

How Do I ______ ?

How do I turn off custom comment pages?

Custom comment pages can sometimes make posts very hard to read especially if those posts start hitting a high number of comments. To disable custom comment pages, go here and scroll down to BASIC OPTIONS. Find the spot where it says DISABLE CUSTOM COMMENT PAGES and select YES from the drop down box. ,b>REMEMBER TO SAVE YOUR CHANGES! That’s it!

What's with the navbar?
The navbar is tool that can either help or annoy, depending on taste. It provides information, quick links, and the ability to search LJ. Keeping it enabled will give you fast access to posting (both in your journal and a community), viewing communities and journals in your style (without typing in ?style=mine manually), and links to your homepage, friends page, friends management, and filters.

Some people (like Pard) love the navbar while some people (like Tracy) hate it. If you want to get rid of it, go here and scroll down to NAVIGATION STRIP. Uncheck the boxes that read always show on journal/community and always show on any journal/community I view.

How do I install Greasemonkey?
Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on (and I think it might be available in other browsers as well) that allows further customization of how your LJ looks and how you can read it. To install it, you, of course, have to have Firefox. Then, go here and install it. Once Greasemonkey is installed, you’ll have to restart your browser to install it completely. When Greasemonkey is installed, you can find various helpful LJ scripts here. We’re going to have a place for people to recommend Greasemonkey scripts down in the comments!

How do I add a header/remove the sidebar/add different metadata/etc on my journal?
This question is harder to answer because there are many ways of customizing your journal. The best thing to do would be to find the community solely dedicated to your journal style (

s2flexisquares,

s2smoothsailing,

s2expressive are the most common) to read up on the various ways to manipulate your journal.

What is ?style=mine?
?style=mine is a simple way to view someone else’s journal in your style. So, if you’re looking at a journal that has writing too small for your eyes, has custom comment pages turned on, has a color scheme that hurts your eyes, all you have to do is append ?style=mine onto the end of the URL and it will change the journal’s look from theirs into yours.

Where do I turn off birthday notifs/userpic notifs/etc?
Yeah, this is a good question. When you set up a new journal, Livejournal turns on a CRAPLOAD of notifications for you. It’s opt out, not opt in. To change your notifications, go here. There are a lot of notifications. Feel free to go down that list and UNCHECK any boxes of notifications you don’t want. Make sure to uncheck both EMAIL and INBOX if you don’t want the notifs showing up at all. PLEASE MAKE SURE TO HIT SAVE CHANGES!.

How do I set up my timezone/my viewing prefs/etc?
If you’re like me, you don’t want to read in UTC settings or see the hover menu or things like that. So, go here. There’s a lot of categories here that you can customize as well. TIMEZONE is near the top and you’d click the drop down box and find your timezone.

There’s also a VERY HELPFUL option a bit below. Find the OTHER JOURNALS and COMMENT PAGES entries. If you check the boxes next to those entries, you’re going to ALWAYS see other journals in YOUR STYLE and you’re ALWAYS going to see comment pages in YOUR STYLE. This, of course, only works if you navigate to the other journals/comment pages from your flist. If you just type the URL into the address bar, it’s not going to work.

How do I create customer friends list filters?

Some people like to read their flist in filters. Some don't. With our friending list set up to sort people into filters, we should know how to create them, at least. So, to start, go here. From there, you'd click NEW which will bring up a box to name the group. Fandom High utilizes the names: alumni, students, comms, teachers and townies. Make sure you have a name for each of those groups and then do not forget to SAVE CHANGES. From there, you can go to the handy dandy friending list and get started adding people to your filters!

What are other Firefox extensions I might find helpful?

Well, everyone has their preferences but, awhile back, we compliled a list of helpful extensions that people in the game recommended. Check those out here!. What other Firefox extensions might be helpful? Let us know in the comments!

What other tips and tricks would you recommend?

We’re not going to be able to cover EVERYTHING because everyone uses LJ in different ways but we can get things started.

Awhile ago, our very own

the_merriest wrote up a great tutorial on how to code preplay tables here. I don’t know about you guys but I still go back to that post when I’m trying to figure out how to code tables. Sometimes, I just forget. I’m a bonehead.

weldedtomyspine has also made an online automatic coder if you'd prefer to do it that way!

If you’re wondering how to backdate or postdate something,

needsaparrot wrote up a tutorial here for your viewing pleasure!

The plot calendar is heavily used and very helpful so, if you’re wondering about that, take a look at the introductory post here!.

Google Calendar can also be a very helpful app for those that are either extra OCD or have trouble remembering what happens when. To create a new calendar, click on settings, which is located in the top right corner of GCal, and then click calendar settings. From there, click the CALENDARS tab and scroll down to CREATE NEW CALENDAR. That's going to bring up a GCal customization page that you can be inputted with whatever you'd like! After you've created your calendar, you can start adding dates/tasks to it! Click on any day and it's going to pop up a box where you can start filling in basic event details. If you'd like to fill out more, click the EDIT EVENT DETAILS link at the bottom of the pop up box. It will bring up more options and more ways for you to customize!

We think that’s a good start and we’d love to hear from you guys below. There’s going to be OCD that you guys can use to drop various tips, tricks, links and other fun stuff to help us all enjoy our LJ experience a little more!

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Wanna know how to do something that you don't see here? Got a question about this post? Questions go here for anything you might need!

Is there a FF extension that you find invaluable that you don't see listed? Drop a link here and feel free to explain!

Lazarus: Form Recovery -- it's been a lifesaver for Firefox crashes or LJ acting up. No more losing the comment/post you just typed!

I second that extension. It's saved me SO MANY times.

If you're OCD (and old) like me, you might like Remember The Milk for Gmail. It adds a little to do list that you can plug in when to post your characters' classes and jobs. Mmm, love it.

FaviconizeTab (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3780/) is one of my favorites this year. For those of us who keep the flist or gcal or twitter open in a tab all the time, it no longer has to take up a full tab length in Firefox! When selected in the tab context menu, FaviconizeTab turns the width of the tab into just the wee page icon.

I looooooooove that one especially at work *coughs*

I also use Fox Clocks which is a handy way of keeping track of what time it is in other timezones. Helpful for me because it means I can ~~wtf at a few other people in other countries staying up till like 5am~~ make posts at times that are good for all players!

Got another tip and/or trick that you wanna share? That goes here! Share away!

LJ keeps adding crappy little "features" to their code that do things like hijack your links to amazon.com and add LJ's affiliate code so they get money if someone buys things. These "features" can slow down site performance considerably and even break the page (that particular code update made it difficult to click on links unless you allowed the sneaky script to run). To disable it, do the following:

1. Go to the Admin Console at http://www.livejournal.com/admin/console/
2. Enter the following command: set opt_exclude_stats 1
3. Hit "execute"

Ooooo! That is shiny! Thank you!

It turns off a lot of LJ's tracking stuff, too. It's one of the first things I do for a new journal!

Sort of as an add on to the above comment, I've been recommending this (http://haku.livejournal.com/416768.html?style=mine) post to everyone on Twitter.

Basically, if you have the adblock (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865/) FF extension installed, you can block a ton of extra crap LJ adds onto its site here as well.

All you have to do is copy each listed URL, go to TOOLS and then scroll to ADBLOCK PREFERENCES and then click on ADD FILTER. Paste the URL into the box that pops up at the top of the screen (under NEW FILTER) and hit OK. That blocks that script from loading. It cuts LJ loading time A LOT.

THIS. *hugs it to pieces* It helps so much and is such an easy fix.

Aha! I was trying to find that post, too, but you beat me to it. :)

Ha! I bookmarked it because omg it's helped me soooooooo much. Freaking ShareThis used to kill my pages.

Thank you! I lost that link in my computer crash. *loves it*

Oh man, I've figured out how to make that work in Opera and Safari, too! I'll have to do a writeup of it when I get home and have access to those browsers.

In case I'm not the only one who's switched to primarily using Chrome instead of Firefox (it's so pretty!), there's now an LJ-login-esque extension available for Chrome called livejournal account juggler. It's not terribly pretty, and it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of LJ-login, but it's nice and functional and way easier than manually signing in and out to swap journals.

Oh, thank you! I use Chrome as my second browser and had no idea that existed! Yay!

OOH! *snags* I didn't know this existed either!

Written, BTW, by our own

sorella_vecchia!

More for the OCD among us. If you use Gmail, you can enable the Labs feature for all sorts of nifty stuff, which includes "Nested Labels." It's basically folders for Gmail (which was also an old greasemonkey extension in Better Gmail that did the same thing).

So that way I can have a label for fandomhigh, and nested below that fandomhigh/raven, fandomhigh/leia, fandomhigh/drake, etc. I've also set my lj accounts up as [email addy]+charactername@gmail.com (gmail ignores everything after the + so you can add anything you want there to your own email and still get it), created filters to tag pings to those ljs with the appropriate label, and then assigned each their own color, so I can see at a glance who has pings in my inbox.

....I might have a problem. Shhh.

...that's kind of an awesome solution (rather than the way I do it - setting up a half dozen dummy gmail accounts to forward and then setting up the filters on the main account to filter things with the pretty colored labels). Thanks for sharing!

That's exactly what I do, too -- that way everyone has their own Gmail, in case I (lol, it NEVER WORKS) manage to stealth. But everyone has pretty colors in my inbox! (Sookie is light green. :D)

THIS IS TOTALLY A SIDE NOTE but it's something my experience being hacked taught me: If you do the forwarding thing, make sure you've sent a few emails from the dummy address. Gmail asks for commonly mailed contacts when you try to get back into an account that's been suspended over suspicious activity -- since I've never knowingly sent anything as Didi, I couldn't answer the questions and lost access to the account. (I'm sure there's a way around this, but it wasn't important enough to me to bother.)

So, yeah. Not really relevant to what you said, but it was an eye-opener for me.

When you set up a new Google account, you can also specify a second contact email address and Google will send you an email with a verification code that can be used to re-claim your account. I've saved them for emergencies such as that, but they add up when add another one for each character! It is a lot easier to use +labels on a single Gmail account.

I also use the LJ Notes (http://www.livejournal.com/manage/notes.bml) feature to notate who my characters know and the degrees of the relationship. That's something I forget all the damn time so making a quick note on if the other character is an acquaintance/friend/girlfriend/enemy means I know the relationship quickly.

To add an LJ note, go here (http://there-was-life.livejournal.com/profile) (note, this is just me using Bod's profile as a demonstration, you'd go to the userinfo of whomever you were adding a note to) and click ADD NOTE on the right hand side. A box will pop up and then you add your note and click save!

You can also enter the notes directly on that first LJ Notes link if you know the username. But I LOL here as all should be aware, notes pop up anywhere you see a username, so right now (if I had this as my note) Tracy's comment line would read:

decoder_rings - Sword class TA, funny boy, should never wear a shirt!

I share because I found this totally shocking the first time!

Edited 2010-08-16 15:57 (UTC)

Hahaha and see, I like that! Mostly because I add silly notes to everyone and then get a chuckle when they pop up!

HAHAHA! I think you're less distracted than - SQUIRREL!

...were we talking?

You can also hover over someone's icon in a thread and add a note. So no need to go to that person's profile!

Oh, I didn't know that! I think I have the hover menu turned off because it annoys me but that's good to know!

I don't know about you guys, but I'm such a space cadet, it's a wonder I manage to remember my kids have classes sometimes, let alone to ping them into them.

So the first thing I do as soon as class tags come out is go up to the little thumbtack on the

fandomhigh profile, and track "notify me when someone posts an entry with [whatever class tag]" for each appropriate character. That way, I'm notified -- for instance, I have a notif that Ghani posted an entry marked "getting by, keeping your advantage" under my fh/katniss nested label (thank you,

trigons_child.) It just reminds me that there's class today, and that here's the character that goes in it.

I also have the OOC comm tacked for when there's a new post in it, as well as

fhplotterywheel and -- this is weird --

stupid_toasters tracked for Tracy's OOC linkdrops, so I don't miss something even if I'm logged in as Sookie and looking at Puck's flist, as I so often am. :D

I also used to use this for cheer practice with Kaylee -- tacked the dorms comm for when someone posted "cheerleader practice." It's a really helpful tip for those of us who'd lose our heads if they weren't attached to our necks.

Edited 2010-08-16 16:36 (UTC)

Oh man, the tack feature is one of my FAVORITE THINGS EVER. I've got the OOC comm tacked for all sorts of things (memes, reminders, etc) and unless LJ is failing with the notifs, I hardly EVER miss anything anymore.

Oh, and I also rely on this site (http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/) if LJ's failing and Twitter hasn't assploded into a rage of OMG LJ IS DOWN *RENDS GARMENTS*.

It's not always spot on but it's more reliable than I predicted it to be when someone pointed it out to me.

If you find that you keep retyping the same stuff a lot, like OCD headings, bits of HTML, and so on, you can use text expansion (http://lifehacker.com/5611210/how-to-use-text-expansion-to-save-yourself-hours-of-typing-every-day) to speed up the process. I love using TextExpander, but it has two negatives: it's only for Mac, and it's not free.

However, the folks at Lifehacker have a free version called Texter (http://lifehacker.com/238306/lifehacker-code-texter-windows) that works for Windows!

For all that OOC stuff that we know and love.

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Tips and Tricks for a Better RPing Experience!

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What are other Firefox extensions I might find helpful?

What other tips and tricks would you recommend?

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