Custom Mood Themes

March 4, 2002: This FAQ is now superseded by the Guide to Mood Icons, located at http://www.livejournal.com/doc/find?guide=moodicons .


One of the features of a paid LiveJournal.com account (http://www.livejournal.com/paidaccounts/ ) is the ability to make your own mood themes, your own little icons special to your journal (see users moonsis or Opi for examples) . If you have a set of pictures that match all of the themes found on the moodlist.bml page, then you're well on your way. (Don't worry, there's not really 100 or so actual pictures you have to make). First of all, all of your pictures need to be on a separate server (you can't upload your mood images directly to LiveJournal.com; see http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=6 for more information). Make sure that you know the image dimensions before you try to set your mood theme, because it will not work without them.

If you go to (http://www.livejournal.com/admin/console) you will be able to enter the commands to set your mood theme. (If you go to the reference, you will see the same commands with < > around them. The < and > are only for reference, and shouldn't be added in the actual commands)

Ready to set your pictures? Ok, make sure your pictures are uploaded to your site, that you have the specific dimensions for each picture, and that you are logged in. The first thing you're going to do is create the theme. Enter in:

moodtheme_create name des

where name = the one word name for your theme
and des = a short description for your theme.

If successful you will be brought to a screen where it will notify that you were successful and it will also give you a theme ID. Remember this number, as it will be used every time you add in information for a mood.


Now it's time for the tedious part. To set each mood, you need to enter in:

moodtheme_setpic themeID moodID picURL width height

where : themeID = the number given to you after creating a moodtheme
moodID = the number of the mood you wish to set (example : happy = 15)
picURL = the full URL of your mood picture (example : http://www.yoursite.com/moodpic.gif)
width = width of the image
height = height of the image

If any of these items are empty when entered it actually deletes whatever information you had for the mood you're trying to set. It might be daunting to think that you need to set over 100 images, but if you notice, all the images are nested. If you set an image for #11 (energetic), then #59 (bouncy) and #52 (hyper) reference the same picture. This way, it's possible to set all of the moods with just 15 images.


You can find the list of moods at ( http://www.livejournal.com/moodlist.bml )


After you've set all of the moods, just go to http://www.livejournal.com/modify.bml and set the mood theme to your personal creation. Remember this is a feature only accessible to paid accounts.
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Thanks to maltor for the updated information.

Last Updated:
tribelessnomad, 2002-03-04

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