Call Me a Dreamer

Not quite a month ago, I went looking for a LiveJournal widget, by which I meant an image I could post on my website, which would link back to my journal. I've got similar widgets for the other venues in which I appear on the web, which are listed on my user profile. The closest I found to what I wanted were the banners listed at http://www.livejournal.com/site/banners.bml. These banners advertise LJ, but they don't link back to an individual journal, and they're all a bit bigger and, uhm, well, less attractive than I wanted. So, I put a notice up on the suggestions board. azurelunatic noticed and helped me to get in contact with an LJ staff member, marta, who told me "Yes, for things like that, you are completely welcome to use the logo."

Having recieved official permission to use the LJ logo, I posted an update and said I'd let everyone know when I had the image ready, After much fiddling around working on other things, and a bit of fiddling around to get the image I wanted, I have finally produced an image which met my standards:



So, until LJ creates an official widget, or changes its collective mind about giving me permission to use their logo, you have my permission to copy this image to your computer, upload it to your website, and use it to link to your journal.

The basic HTML code to link to your journal is:

<a href="h t t p : / / username.livejournal.com/"><img src="path/LJ_widget.png" border="0"></a>

Note 1: You will need to delete the spaces from the code above (which were needed to keep LJ from automatically creating a link), substitute your username for the word "username," and substitute the actual location of your copy of the image for the word "path."

Note 2: Please, don't link back to the image in my galleries. I don't know for sure that it would be a problem, but I'd rather not have to apologize to LJ for bringing down a server.

Hi, All! I haven't been posting much as I've been busy putting together a new writerly webpage, as my existing page is slanted toward my technical writing persona. My next task will be to update the old technical-writing-persona website. I'm thinking of renaming the old site and snagging that site name for my new fiction-writer site, as I think it works better there and I've come up with something I think will work for my corporate-type persona. Besides improving the look and feel of my website, one of my primary goals is to bring them up-to-date in terms of HTML and CSS, so they are compliant with today's standards.

One small annoyance that came up as I was putting together links to my various online presences (I'm on LinkedIn, GoodReads, and Elance, in addition to LiveJournal): I was going to have a section on my Links page for each of these and with the single exception of LiveJournal, all of these sites offer "widgets," which are in this context, icons linked to my identity within that site, that I can place on my webpage. I wanted a similar widget for LiveJournal, but my searches through the LJ support pages have turned up nothing. I tried googling for an LJ widget, but all I got were either widgets for other sites, designed to be added to LJ, or widgets that will stream random LJ news, and similar stuff. It seems strange to me that there isn't a dedicated LJ widget. After all, all I'd need would be an image of the LJ pencil with a link back to my site. I could even create one myself, but I hesitate to use the LJ pencil icon without explicit permission from LJ. Am I missing something (which is probably really obvious), or is this something LJ just doesn't do?

Note: I've submitted a question to LJ Support, but as there are over 1000 open questions (over 700 unanswered), I don't expect an answer in the very near future.