Mood Theme Troubleshooting
My bandwidth is down again. It should be up again tomorrow. I've been getting a lot of similar comments and problems on my "how to" post, so I wrote up a basic troubleshooting post.

Q: I uploaded my mood theme, but the images are coming up as broken links. What do I do?

1. The first thing to check is whether the URLs in your admin console codes are valid or not. Copy one of the URLs you have in your codes and paste them into a web browser. If the image comes up when you go to that URL, then that's not your problem, so move on to #2. If it comes up with an error message, or a broken link, then you need to fix your URL. Here's what to check for:

i) If you're using Photobucket.com to host your images, verify that your URLs look like this:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/????/username/mood.jpg

The "????"s are the "letter-number-number-number" account number that PB gives you for your album. It's in the urls for all the images you upload. All you need to do to get the URLs for your mood images is copy and paste the URL in the text box right underneath the image in your album. The account number will already be in it. Just take off the "mood.jpg" at the end of it, and replace "http://www.hosting.com/" with your URL.

As before, paste in one of the URLs into a web browser to check that it works before you try to upload the mood theme to the admin console.

ii) If you're using a site such as ImageShack, TinyPic, or LJ's picture scrapbook, you need to replace all of the URLs in your codes one by one. This is because when you upload an image to a site like this, it does not keep the file name, and instead assigns it a random number/letter combination. If you're determined to use one of these services instead of PB or a domain for hosting, you'll have to go through each of the 132 moods and copy/paste the URLs into the admin console codes to replace the default URL.

ii) Your file extension might be wrong. All my mood themes are made in .jpg, but if you're using someone else's and their mood theme is .png or .gif, then you need to do a replace all and change the ".jpg" to whatever the file type is.

2. If the URLs work fine when you paste them into a web browser, something's gone wrong in the admin console. Go back and start again at the beginning of the steps from the tutorial. If that doesn't work, there's two possible problems:

i) You didn't paste in the full code, so some of the images are coming up as broken links. Make sure you have the whole adminconsolecodes.txt file selected when you copy it.

ii) Your URLs may be too long, and LJ's cutting them off. This is a new problem with LJ, and is more annoyingly useless than the nudge feature. The only thing you can do is move your mood images to a folder closer to your main album, so that the URLs will be shorter and they won't be cut off.

iii) If you're using your own hosting on a domain, check that you don't have hotlink protection on, or make sure that it's set so that images in that album can be linked on an outside site.

Q: I followed everything in the instructions for a free account mood theme, but when I post, it just posts the HTML, and doesn't actually show the image. What do I do?

You're updating in rich-text mode. Underneath the update text box there's the following text "(Use the 'Source' button to edit HTML. You also can switch back to the plain text mode.)" Follow the link to switch to plain text.

If your mood theme still isn't working, comment here with a description of your problem and I'll try to help. If it's a problem with broken images, please leave the theme on your LJ so I can figure out what the problem is.