Purplettes (set of 15) preview download zip file

  Redheaded Stepchild (set of 85)  preview download zip file

Okay, first up… you need to have a paid account.  At least on Live Journal.  There are similar journal sites that allow you to have custom moods on with a free account: Greatest Journal for instance.  Anyway, check to make sure you can use them before you bother downloading them.

Right click on the download zip file link and 'save target as' to a temporary folder on your hard drive.

Unzip the file with Winzip.  Inside you should find a number of images and a text file.

Upload the images to your webspace*, making sure that your webspace allows remote image loading.  If it doesn't, or you don't have webspace, there are a number of free image hosts available.  I recommend Photobucket (If you use Photobucket, remember to check the 'save image filenames'  box when you upload.

Log into your LJ account and got to the admin console http://www.livejournal.com/admin/console/

There's a command box there, type into it moodtheme_create "title of theme" "description of theme".  You will be given a mood theme ID number.  Make a note of this number.

Open the text file that came with the images in wordpad/metapad/something that has a replace function. 

Replace the yourthemeid with the number you got from the admin console.

Replace yourservername.com with the URL of your image host.

Copy the entire contents of the modified text file and paste it into the command box on the admin console page.  You should get a confirmation page afterwards.

Go to the modify journal page http://www.livejournal.com/modify.bml and open the drop-down mood box.  The custom themes are at the bottom of the list, select your mood and click on 'Save changes'.

Tah dah!

BTW, putting a small note saying 'custom mood by maryavatar' on your profile would be nice, but I'm not going to hound you down and spank you if you don't.

*please do not link to the images on the preview pages.  You will either be sucking up my bandwidth, which is evil, or the images won't show up, thanks to the block on remote image loading on my webspace.