The Chasing Iamb

but maybe my inner geek just needed The Style Archive. This morning I figured how to use juicy, beautiful templates the internet is littered with.

Now you can have it too!

Go to the Style Archive and pick a style that excites you. Read what the designer says about its compatibility with Livejournal Basic, Plus or Paid Accounts. Usually these styles work with with particular layouts that Livejournal offers you. So that's something you have to figure out from the designer's notes. My new style for instance works with a layout called Bloggish that Livejournal already offers.


PHASE ONE

Step 1: Download the style's zip file. This folder will contain a bunch of images, a CSS file and a base weblog file.
Step 2: Go to livejournal scrapbook and create a new gallery for your new style.
Step 3: Upload the style's images into livejournal's scrapbook into the new gallery.

Tip: If you are using windows, windows has something called a web publishing wizard. You can access the web publishing wizard by going to Tools/FolderOptions/Show common tasks in folders. Look at the left pane for publish your images to the web.

PHASE TWO

Step 1: Download Notepad Plus, a text editor you can get for free. (yaay)
Step 2: Open a file in Notepad Plus and call this 'list'
Step 3: In list write the names of all the image files in the original style folder.
Step 4: Open your scrapbook and locate the new names of the images because as you will see Scrapbook has renamed all of them. Copy these names into list with its original names. Make sure you write the names of the image files and not their URLs.
Step 5: Open the css file using Notepad Plus and find the original image names in the code and change them to the new image names.

PHASE THREE

Step  1: In Livejournal go to Customise my Journal/Look and Feel
Step 2: Set your journal layout to Bloggish (or whatever style layout the design has specifically asked for)
Step 3. Set your theme to None
Step 4: Select "Use Base Weblog CSS"
Step 5:  Cut  and paste the style's CSS into the Custom CSS field
Step 6:  Remove 'import base_weblog.css' from the style's CSS
Step 7: Save and you are all done. Yahoo