InsaneJournal

For those of you that have me added on my roleplay pages, you'll know that I maintain what I call a character development journal, or a CDJ for future reference. This is a term I picked up on InsaneJournal and though I largely do my RP business on Roleplayer.me, I like having a secondary place to stash all my headcanons and drabbles for my characters. I like to be organized and simply put, the blogs and group pages on Roleplayer.me just don't have what I'm looking for.

One of my character development journals looks like this. The link will open in a new tab. For anybody that's interested in maintaining one of these for themselves, I'm going to go over how I've got mine set up on my various journals. There's a lot of different ways to use a CDJ but this is how I use mine.

The General Setup

On my CDJ, I tend to use A Small Affair from Tessisamess. I use "Coupled" on Christian's with a modified tags list. Tess has a lot of other really nice layouts, but ASA is my favorite for what I need, and it's easily customizable if you know how to work with CSS.

On most of my CDJs, such as Lestat's. you'll notice that I have two sidebars and the center column holds all my posts.

On the left side, I have one of the 'custom text' blurbs for a quote or perhaps some lyrics. Maybe a couple key points about my character. I also have my tags list on this side. The tags run in a hierarchy, but I'll get to that later.

On the right, I have my links list (which is actually one module, despite looking like two), and another blurb where I've put a tiny disclaimer/note.

In the center column, above all my posts, is my dropbox. This has a little blurb for my character and a gif of some sort. Hidden underneath a text cut is a more formal disclaimer. The general "I'm not this person, I don't own this series, blah blah blah".

My dropbox is kind of a pinned post in the way that I set the date of that post way in the future so then all posts I make will show up under that post. People can comment my dropbox to get in touch with me if need be. It's also tagged, just because I can.

Tagging Posts

I used to roleplay on Tumblr a lot, and one thing I always liked was how I could tag things. I could have all my character studies and headcanons in one place, and have all my pictures or aesthetics in another. I just don't really like Tumblr for RP anymore so I don't use it. That being said, it was a hassle. I'm not going to go into detail why, though.

On InsaneJournal, the tagging system is very clean and minimalistic. You have a 40-character limit for your tags, including spaces and symbols. If you decide one day you don't like a certain tag, you don't have to go through all your journal posts and rename the tag. InsaneJournal has a handy link on their sidebar labeled "Manage Tags" and from there, I can rename one tag and it will automatically change for all the posts with that tag.

As I said earlier, the tags on your main journal page can run in a hierarchy (or an unordered list). There's also a cloud option when you go to customize your journal, but I don't like the cloud format.

To make a tag hierarchy, we use words and colons (:).

As you can see on Lestat's journal, I have a bunch of tags that are like muse: topic. If I tag a post with just "muse", then "muse" will become a tag link by itself. I try to keep to a max of three hierarchy levels.

LEVEL ONE: ( MUSE )

• muse

LEVEL TWO: ( MUSE: TOPIC )

• muse
  • topic

LEVEL THREE: ( MUSE: TOPIC: SUBTOPIC )

• muse
  • topic
    • subtopic

If I use muse: topic, then "muse" will become a little text header, and topic will become the tag link. The link moves down the line as you add more hierarchy levels. I tend to stick to short words and try to not use more than two for each level, because of the character limit. If something is more than two words, I might paraphrase with acronyms, like 'JCB' for 'Jamie Campbell Bower'.

The Links List

When you go to customize your journal, you'll see that there's two systems to choose from (S1 or S2). All the layouts I use are S2 because they let me display my tags on my main journal page, and they're just easier to use in general, though some S1 layouts are very nice.

Below the system selection, there's another section for the "links list".

10 (link title) (link url)
20 (link title) (link url)
30 (link title) (link url)
40 (link title) (link url)
50 (link title) (link url)

As you can see here, the links descend in digital increments of 10. If I put a title on 10 and no link URL, 10 will become a link header.

On my links list, I have a header, three links, another header, and two more links. When I created the new header under the initial three links, it created a "break" in the links module so it looks like I have two link lists instead of just one. This will differ from layout to layout, but this is how it works on A Small Affair.

This gray space is the main links module.
The white spaces are governed by your input.
I'm using mine as an example.

Link Header

Link Name
Link Name
Link Name

This space becomes transparent because of the next header.

Link Header

Link Name
Link Name

Makes sense now, right? The layout I use allows for quite a lot of links, but I try to keep them to a minimum so I don't have to reorder everything. I wish there was a better way to configure the links but there isn't, unfortunately.

Using Your Journal

You can organize and run your journal however you like, but you generally want to have some kind of dropbox where people can reach you for whatever reason. I've already written a general tutorial on how to use this site, and that's located here. If you're already familiar with this site, then you know what to do.

That link holds some of the more important information, like how to create a text cut/read-more and how to make all your (coming) posts have certain privacy levels without you having to click the little dropdown box.

Mostly on my journal, I post my drabbles, headcanons, character studies, musings, and maybe a picture or two. tessisamess has a ton of really nice character profiles/character sheets that you can fill out for your character, if that's what you're looking for. Personally, I use my own basic format for everything but you can be as extra and ostentatious as you like.