InsaneJournal

I have been on a lot of different sites designed for roleplaying. I've been on Tumblr, I've been on MySpace, I've been on a lot of the mock-MySpace sites, and I've been here on InsaneJournal.

InsaneJournal can be a bit to take in if you've just started here, so I'm going to start with the basics and work my way up. First, I'm going to work with the functionality of the site, and then I'll move to fun things like customizing your journal to your specific style.

Click the titles on this post to expand the topics and see the content.

1. When you make a post to InsaneJournal, you cannot use JavaScript. You can use HTML and inline CSS, however basic or extravagant it might be.
2. When you make a post, if you use "BR" or "P" for a line break, be sure to click "disable auto-formatting" before you post or your paragraphs will be spaced out like a mile apart. I'm exaggerating but yes... it looks weird.
3. You don't need 500 emails for all your different usernames. ONE email, limitless journals (or at least, it feels limitless). Whatever the case, you can get all your journal notifications together on a singular email address.
4. After a week of having your journal, you may generate one free invite code, which you can use to create another journal for yourself, or give it to a friend. And once that journal is active for a week, it can also generate a new invite code. So on, and so forth.
5. InsaneJournal autosaves your last-entered post information as a draft, so just in case your browser crashes, you might be able to recover it. Your coding is also preserved in the text field so all your line breaks and paragraphs remain spaced out instead of all being squished together.

InsaneJournal works like LiveJournal and DreamWidth. It's a blog-based site. It's kind of like a forum, but not really. I've been on forums and they annoy me, but I like InsaneJournal.

Forums have main topics on the home page, then subtopics, and threads. InsaneJournal has posts with comment threads.

When you go to the basic homepage (www.insanejournal.com), you have a sidebar with the following categories.

• View
• Journal
• Account
• Friends
• Asylums
• Site

Some of the links here are pretty self-explanatory, but I'll try to give them a little explanation, anyway.

My Writings - Leads to your actual journal. This is the place where you deck everything out and where people access all your content.
My Diagnosis - Leads to your profile. This is where people go if they want to add you to their friends list. This might have some other stuff on the page but it's not the primary place to be. You can add some minor customization to the "bio" section here but this page is not meant to be totally decked out and flashy.
My Friends - Leads to a sub-page of your journal. If you've added anybody (or any comm journals) as a friend from your journal, their public (and permissioned) posts will show up here. If that journal is a friend-locked community journal, only you and their other friends will see those posts. They will be invisible to non-members of that comm or the site itself.
My Archive - View journal posts on a page by the month and year. This is kind of like the archive function on Tumblr.
My Memories - When you add a post to your "memories", it's similar to "liking" a post on Tumblr so you can view it later. This is just where you go to view all the things you've saved.
Notifs & PMs - Pretty self-explanatory. PMs are kind of a pain on this site because to start a PM thread you have to actually type in the person's handle, and you don't get an email notification or anything telling you if someone's sent you a PM.
Edit Entries - Self-explanatory.
Customize Journal - I will explain this in a later category but this is where you go to style your journal page. It's like adding a Tumblr theme to your blog but it's a little more complicated to explain because of how there's two style systems (S1 and S2).
Comment Settings - Control who can comment on your journal posts and whether or not you get email copies for these comments.
Recent Comments - Shows you where and when your most recent 25 comments were made.
Manage Tags - Self-explanatory, but here's the cool thing. You can simultaneously rename all your tags using the 'rename' feature on this page. Works great for if you decide you don't like a certain tag or if you found you made a typo.
Manage Account - Self-explanatory. Just a note, this is not the place you want to go if you want to change your account email. That's on "Manage Profile".
Viewing Options - Change how you see the user interface of the site.
Manage Profile - Essentially like the "Basic Info" section of MySpace. Your display name, account email, and all of that stuff can be changed on this page.
Manage Notifications - Self-explanatory.
Manage Pictures - Manage your icons. The standard size on site is 100 by 100 pixels.
Account Status - If you decide you want to delete your journal for some reason, this is the page you use. Just use the dropdown box to select "deactivated" and after 14 days your journal will be deleted permanently. Although, I'm pretty sure all your comments are left behind even if you delete.
Edit Friends - Basically, you can add friends by just typing in their handles. On your friends list, there's green and blue arrow icons. The green ones mean that you have friended them, and the blue means they've friended you.
Edit Custom Groups - If you decide you want to filter your post privacy to certain people, or even just a certain person, you can create a "custom group" here. Just type in the name of your custom group, select the member(s) you want, and hit "save". Then when you go to post an entry, you can select that custom group and the filter will be applied.
Friends Filter - I've never really bothered with this, to be honest? So I'm not exactly sure how it works or what it looks like when you play with it.
Nudge Friends - If you've got a buddy that hasn't been around for a while, this is basically like poking them on Facebook.
Invite - You have to have an invite code to join InsaneJournal, and those are usually acquired through an already-existing member of the site. This is where you go to get those invite codes, and generate new ones.
Asylum Invitations - If somebody invites you to their asylum, this is where you can find those invitations and accept them.
Manage Asylums - If you maintain/run a(n) asylum/community journal, this is where you can find all the pending join requests from other users of the site. This is also where you can manage the asylum notifications.
Create Asylum - Exactly what it sounds like. Create a community journal where your friends and writing partners can post to the same journal and chat.
Support - Technical support for IJ.
Upgrade - Upgrades for your account.
FAQ - Self-explanatory.
Search Randomly - Click this to be taken to a random journal on the site.

Whether or not you use formatting for your posts is up to you. Some people just type text in and hit "post" without worrying about extensive formatting. I tend to use regular text for just banter posts, but some posts I will use formatting, however extensive that might be.

If you're making a long post but you don't want all of it to show up and would like a read-more, use this code:

<lj-cut text="Label/Title">text</lj-cut>.

If you don't want to give your text cut any specific label, simply get rid of the text="Label/Title" in the code.

Text cuts are best to use if you want to use specially-coded in-entry posts. Sometimes your post might not look good on your actual journal page, so it's better to keep them under a text cut. Text cuts are also good for hiding things like spoilers or material that might be offensive/triggering to other people. That's where having the custom labels is nice, because then anybody that doesn't want to see that stuff, doesn't have to see it.

Like I said above, adding friends to your InsaneJournal is actually extremely easy. As long as you have the correct user handle, you can simply go to this page here and type your friend's handle in the small dialog box there. Hit 'save changes' and it's easy as that!

Once you've created your journal, you have the option to edit your profile. Another option you are offered is to upload your userpics. You are allowed 100 icons as a Free Patient member. Icons are typically the default 100x100 pixels.

Keep note that some people like to use the keywords to sort their picture. They do this because sometimes when replying to another person, they like to change their icon so their muse's icon reflects their emotions. When you go to comment someone's journal, simply click the browse button and it will bring a dialog box up with all your icons in one place!

This is one of the trickier things to do on InsaneJournal. There is a glitch that happens quite a lot (I don't know why) so just pay attention to this part.

When you first find a panfandom game or any kind of roleplaying group, you usually have to go through a mod journal to even find the comms to request (and those comms are usually found when you read the application). Some asylums have an open membership (which means you don't have to wait to be accepted) and some have a closed membership (meaning you must request the comm before whoever moderates those comms can approve your journal into the asylum).

When you click on the link to join a community journal, you will see a page like this. When you click "Join Community", you will see another page that looks like this. Don't worry about that. Simply refresh the page on your browser. You may be asked to resend information, so click "okay". The owner of that comm journal will get an email saying that you want to join the asylum in question. They will approve you and then you will get an email saying you have been accepted into the comm. I could be wrong but I think you might also get an email saying if they rejected your request.

When you decide to post to that particular comm from your journal, simply go to post a new journal entry. There will be a dropdown box and you simply click the name of the journal you would like to post in.

Note: Since I am using my CDJ handle in all my examples, there are no other journals in my dropdown box because my CDJ is not associated with any community journals.

This is where the fun REALLY begins. When you first start your journal, it's naked. And you might want it to be prettified. There's really a vast amount of customization options, but if you want a neat and clean-cut looking journal, some of my favorite places to be for that kind of stuff is tessisamess, lobelia, and chestnutgallery.

The first thing you need to know is that there are two different kinds of customization styles on InsaneJournal. S1 and S2.

Each style has several different sub-styles that you can use to customize your journal.

S1 is complicated and requires a bit of extra know-how with HTML. These journals can look extremely fancy and have very nice customization options, but they aren't for the faint of heart. Especially if you only want to make minor alterations. Chestnut Gallery focuses exclusively on S1 journal layouts and themes.

S2 is easier to use but still requires basic knowledge of how HTML/CSS works, just in case you want to make changes to your layout. Lobelia focuses exclusively on S2 journal layouts and themes.

Tess ( tessisamess ) deals in both S1 and S2 style layouts. Make sure to follow the instructions when using these layouts. She makes it really easy and she's usually super responsive if you need help for whatever reason. She also LOVES seeing how you use her resources, so don't be afraid to comment and show it off!

Hollow Art is a site dedicated to helping people get icons for their face claims, check them out! You never know what icons you might find.

CDJ is just an acronym for the phrase "Character Development Journal" but to be completely honest with you there is no right or wrong way to use a CDJ and everyone does their own thing.

I used to use mine to keep track of my games and my various characters.

I keep a private post that has all my journals sorted by their fandom for easy access. I had another post that had a list of the games I was currently involved in as well as their comm journals and their mod journal in case someone stumbled upon me and wished to join that game as well.

My other posts were simply character rosters that told me which characters I was playing in that game, who their roommates were, which room they were staying in, and which journal I was using for that character in that particular game.

Other posts are like this one. Informative and educational (sort of) or they have a list of contact information.

This is a longer post about CDJs and how I organize mine. The link will open in a new tab.

If you want to link another journal, this is a simple link code that's like using the "@" feature. There is no closing tag for the code, it's just the way you see it.

<lj user="username">

Starter posting is easy. All you need is this template right here. That being said, you can customize it however you like or need.

<small>|[ WHO ]|</small> : Characters involved in storyline <small>|[ WHERE ]|</small> : Location of the roleplay taking place <small>|[ WHEN ]|</small> : Can be canon point, time of day, anything. <small>|[ WHAT ]|</small> : What is going on in the storyline? <small>|[ RATING ]|</small> : G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17, take your pick. Make sure to include a trigger warning, if there needs to be one. <small>|[ STATUS ]|</small> : Open, Closed, Open to character one, two, three, and four. <lj-cut text="Title or text here"> <center> <div style="width:550px;text-align:left;"><font style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height:110%;color: #000000;"> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer nec odio. Praesent libero. Sed cursus ante dapibus diam. Sed nisi. Nulla quis sem at nibh elementum imperdiet. Duis sagittis ipsum. Praesent mauris. Fusce nec tellus sed augue semper porta. <b>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit</b>. Mauris massa. <b>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit</b>. Vestibulum lacinia arcu eget nulla. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Curabitur sodales ligula in libero. Sed dignissim lacinia nunc. <b>Praesent mauris</b>. Curabitur tortor. Pellentesque nibh. Aenean quam. In scelerisque sem at dolor. <i>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit</i>. Maecenas mattis. Sed convallis tristique sem. <b>Vestibulum lacinia arcu eget nulla</b>. Proin ut ligula vel nunc egestas porttitor. Morbi lectus risus, iaculis vel, suscipit quis, luctus non, massa. Fusce ac turpis quis ligula lacinia aliquet. Mauris ipsum. <b>Aenean quam</b>. Nulla metus metus, ullamcorper vel, tincidunt sed, euismod in, nibh. Quisque volutpat condimentum velit. <b>Sed dignissim lacinia nunc</b>. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. </lj-cut>

Now, this template is actually just slightly fancier than just typing in a normal comment with the top portion with the who, what, when, where and other stuff. When you actually hit the "Save" button and view the entry, it will look like this. Replace the 'lorem ipsum' with your own writing and your starter is done.

Now you just have to wait for your roleplay partner to reply to your comment and begin the thread for real.

Are you a selective roleplayer and don't want snoopy RL people fishing through your journal posts and occasional fanfics? All you have to do is friend-lock your journal. If your journal is friend-locked, nobody but you and your friends will be able to see your journal posts. Everyone else will have to wallow in their misery of not being able to snoop on you.

To friend-lock your journal, go to this page here and enter the following command:

set newpost_minsecurity <level>

Do not use the < or > sign. It is purely for reference. Replace "Level" with "Friends" and there you have it. All posts after you've entered this command will automatically post as "friends only".

We all have that one character who knows one or two languages other than their native. Occasionally you'll want to use those languages but of course, not everybody knows how to speak Spanish, French, Japanese or Romanian. So what do we do?

Use this code here:

<a title="English translation goes here">Your foreign language segment goes here</a>

That's all you need. Easy, right? Here's an example:

사랑해!