All LJ-specific tags

[fiddlingfrog]

This is a not-very-brief reference guide to every LiveJournal specific tag and markup that you can use in an entry. Many of them can be used simply by pressing a button in the Rich Text Editor, but some of them have to be added in via the HTML editor. This guide explains how to use them all with the HTML editor.

Please feel free to spread this around using the repost button you'll find in the repost section.

Table of contents:

• LJ-Cut
• LJ-Spoiler
• LJ User
• LJ-Embed
• LJ-Map
• LJ-Poll
• LJ-Like & LJ-Give
• LJ-Repost
• LJ-Raw
• LJ-Lang
• Writer's Block (LJ-Template)
• LJ-Replace
• LJ-Phonepost


The Cut

Let's start with the most used, the most popular, the most misunderstood and misused lj-tag: the cut. An LJ-cut is a way to hide part of your entry when readers view it on your recent entries or day view pages, or when your friends view it on their friends page.


If you're reading this on the entry page please click here to see the entry with the cut intact. That's probably the first thing you need to remember about cuts: when you write your entry and click preview or you click post to {journal/community} and View the entry, you won't see the cut. They don't appear on the entry page or the page with comments.

To make this cut I used the following code in the HTML editor:

text="This is the cut. Click it to see more information." >
PLACE HIDDEN TEXT HERE

The italicized bit (text="something...") is optional, and can be used by you to change the default "Read more" wording to something more descriptive.

There is an official FAQ about the cut.

Spoilers!

Spoiler tags are the new baby cousin to the cut tag. Like a cut tag, they hide bits of your entry behind them. Unlike a cut tag, they expand in place without having to re-load the entry page. You use it like so:

[Warning text]
Spoilers!


and you'll get [Warning text]Spoilers! in your text. You'll see the warning text surrounded by [ brackets ] instead of the ( parentheses ) you see around cuts on the journal page. As of late April there is no way to collapse a spoiler back into its unexpanded state.
Something you'll see a lot in film and television communities is the dual use of both a cut and a spoiler tag. This gives the reader two chances to decide whether or not they really want to read the spoiler contained inside.

There is an official FAQ about spoilers.

The User tag

The user tag is used to add a link to another journal, community, or syndicated feed on LiveJournal alongside the account's userhead. For example, the following code:

exampleusername - communityname - samplefeed

produces:
exampleusername - communityname - samplefeed. Did you notice how the second example replaced "user" with "comm"? You can use "user" to a link to a community, but "comm" is just as valid.

You can also change the displayed name of the user by utilizing a bit of code like this:

exampleusername

which gives us:
exampleusername.

And lastly, what do you do if you want to link one of the new identity accounts that are popping up all over LJ? You know, the people that log in from Twitter or Google or Facebook. Well, it's a little involved because you can't just type in user="blah" (you'll get an error), but it's not too complicated. What you need to do is first visit their profile page (the little or or or next to their name is a userhead, just like yours, that links directly to the profile page). When you get there, click on "Track user" and look at the URL that shows up in your address bar. At the end of the URL you'll see a bit that looks like "ext_####". That's LiveJournals' internal username for the account, and that's what you have to use in the user tag. So

ext_1

gives us:
ext_1

There is an official FAQ about user tags.

Embedding

Right, now we start getting into the weird ones. Embedding is used to add a video, widget, game, or other interactive content into your entry (and comment, in some cases). Now, because of security concerns LJ doesn't allow embedding from all and every website out there - they maintain a white list of sites that they allow embedded code from. And only the biggest sites get to use iframe embedding, which is what YouTube uses now. So if you try to embed a video you just found on some obscure website, and it doesn't work, now you know why. Moving on...

To embed a YouTube video into your entry you first need to get the embed code from the video. Let's use this one. Find the embed code and copy it.

Now back here on LJ use the following code:



which results in:



Click to view



The ll-embed tag tells LJ that the code contained in them is an embed from another site. Without those tags LJ (usually*) won't recognize the embed code and either a bunch of gibberish will get displayed, or nothing at all.

Incidentally, if you go back and edit your entry later you'll notice that an id=# attribute has been added to the lj-embed tag. This is LJ's way of identifying the embedded code on your journal. It's also an easy way for you to count how many times you've posted a widget or video to your journal.

* I say usually because YouTube embed code can be pasted directly into an entry or comment and LJ will add the lj-embed tags for you.

There is an official FAQ about embedding.

Maps

You can embed maps from Google using the lj-map tag. You need the URL from the map once you've got it set the way you want it to be seen (and the short URL you can get by clicking on "link" doesn't work for LJ), which you then use like