I'm not an IM person and I'll tell you up front that I'm very distracted at this time of year and know nothing about conditions that can make it difficult to learn things. If that's all right with you, I'm still happy to try to help. If you find someone else who can do better, just let me know and I'll stop trying to help. :)
To keep from appearing ignorant in public, I suggest you practive making cuts using your own journal. Just set the security level on your practice post to, "private." You can post anything you want and nobody but you will see it. If you get it wrong, no big deal! Just edit until it's what you want.
Making an LJ-Cut is fairly easy, especially if you're familiar with HTML. I'm going to assume you are not so forgive me if I over-explain.
You use tags to tell a program how to display something in a manner that is different from normal. If you respond to this comment, look at the e-mail that LJ send to you. See where it quotes what I typed? Before and after the word "tags" in the 1st paragraph of this sentence, you'll see some code that told the browser to show the word in italics. That code is the tag.
For every tag you open, you must close it. You do this by adding a backslash to the start of the tag code. That's what the tag I added after the word, "tags" is: a closing tag for italics.
If you know this pattern, then all you need to know is what the little code is for an LJ Cut. Substitute < for [ and > for ] in your code. I have to use brackets or else it tries to apply the code rather than show it. The code looks like this:
This is the lead-in info. [lj-cut]This is the stuff that gets hidden.[/lj-cut] And this is the that doesn't.
On your post, you'd see...
This is the lead-in info. (more...) And this is the that doesn't.
When you preview the post, it does not show you the LJ-Cut, which makes it hard to be 100% certain. However, if you've gotten the coding wrong, it'll immediately be obvious because you typically get a, "...irreparable error in...user must fix..." instead of a post to proof. Before I felt comfortable witht he system, I posted everything that had a cut as private first, check it, and THEN edit the security to make it public.
The LiveJournal FAQ (http://www.livejournal.com/support/faq.bml) is, at best, a work in progress but sometimes it will answer your question. The maximum size of a post? I don't see it. I don't post stories so I've never choked on it. I'd say a good, general rule is what, 10 pages? But I certainly do not know that answer to that.
Re: Woeful newbie
To keep from appearing ignorant in public, I suggest you practive making cuts using your own journal. Just set the security level on your practice post to, "private." You can post anything you want and nobody but you will see it. If you get it wrong, no big deal! Just edit until it's what you want.
Making an LJ-Cut is fairly easy, especially if you're familiar with HTML. I'm going to assume you are not so forgive me if I over-explain.
You use tags to tell a program how to display something in a manner that is different from normal. If you respond to this comment, look at the e-mail that LJ send to you. See where it quotes what I typed? Before and after the word "tags" in the 1st paragraph of this sentence, you'll see some code that told the browser to show the word in italics. That code is the tag.
For every tag you open, you must close it. You do this by adding a backslash to the start of the tag code. That's what the tag I added after the word, "tags" is: a closing tag for italics.
If you know this pattern, then all you need to know is what the little code is for an LJ Cut. Substitute < for [ and > for ] in your code. I have to use brackets or else it tries to apply the code rather than show it. The code looks like this:
This is the lead-in info.
[lj-cut]This is the stuff that gets hidden.[/lj-cut]
And this is the that doesn't.
On your post, you'd see...
This is the lead-in info.
(more...)
And this is the that doesn't.
When you preview the post, it does not show you the LJ-Cut, which makes it hard to be 100% certain. However, if you've gotten the coding wrong, it'll immediately be obvious because you typically get a, "...irreparable error in...user must fix..." instead of a post to proof. Before I felt comfortable witht he system, I posted everything that had a cut as private first, check it, and THEN edit the security to make it public.
The LiveJournal FAQ (http://www.livejournal.com/support/faq.bml) is, at best, a work in progress but sometimes it will answer your question. The maximum size of a post? I don't see it. I don't post stories so I've never choked on it. I'd say a good, general rule is what, 10 pages? But I certainly do not know that answer to that.