Total newbie to LT AND LJ-Could use some help.

OK, so I found LT about a week ago, and immediately became obsessed with entering my books. Now I would like to review them and write about them on LJ. How do I put the book cover/link on LJ? How do I add links to posts here? What is a widget? HELP!

Thanks so much.

I spun off a separate LiveJournal just to host my reviews (http://btripp-books.livejournal.com) ... you can find a "permanent link" for each book at the very bottom on the "Book Information" page and you can use that to link back if you want to (personally, I link out to Amazon, but that's just the marketer in me!).

Now, I've been scanning all the books I've reviewed, so I have cover graphic files handy for my reviews, but you can go to the "Book Information" page, right-click on the cover image, select "view image" (in FireFox ... in MSIE you'd have to select "properties" and then highlight the URL) and grab the image file's address from the resulting tab/window.

Here's the HTML for doing a linked cover:
<a href="" target=_blank><img src="" border="0"></a>

Now, I also have stuff in there for the size of the image, the alignment, and the spacing (which I skipped for clarity here), but that's the basic format, with the page URL (from the "permanent link") going in the "href"'s quotes and the image URL (as per the above) going in the "img src"'s quotes.

Generally, for adding a link, you can just do:
<a href="">text</a>
... that's an "anchor" tag (hence the "a") in HTML.

I usually add the target thing so it opens in a new tab/window, and (in the image coding) a border call so the image doesn't have a blue line around it!

Hope this helps!

For the images, if you're using firefox, you can also just right-click on the book image on the info page and select "copy image location" rather than viewing the image THEN copying the address. By selecting copy image location, the address will go straight to your clipboard, then you can paste the address into your html.

If you "copy image location" for the cover LJ has an "insert image" feature that allows you to insert images based on URLs.

Or you could just put your review in the "review" field of the book entry.

Using IE, I typically right-click on image in my catalog listing, "copy," and then just paste into the LJ entry. Very easy.

Now widgets ... that's another matter. From LT's tools page there's a link to an LJ-compatible widget. I have successfully tinkered with this to create a random books listing on my sidebar. Here's my LiveJournal page if you want to take a look.

Let me know if you'd like more "how to" on this.

Thanks for the help. I seem to have done it correctly for my first review (http://his-kid.livejournal.com/5832.html).

Hey His_Kid,

Welcome to LibraryThing.com; it's a pretty cool Web Site. I absolutely love www.livejournal.com too. It's a sweet combination to talk with friends connected to both Web Sites.

Have a great day and God bless.

In Christ,
Joshua Brooks
US Army