Hello everyone. I'm just taking a moment to make a little public service announcement here. I know plenty of you is pretty new to Livejournal. We all make beginner's mistakes, after all.
However, given an increased frequency of problems with livejournal cuts ("LJ-cuts"), I've decided to make a little, quick tutorial for quick reference.
WHY MAKE A LIVEJOURNAL CUT?Have an art dump? Drew lots of pictures and want to show them to the community? That's great! However, all those pictures showing up on one's friend list can be a pain for people whose internet is slow, or who are downloading something. How do you avoid immodestly clogging someone's friend page? By making a
livejournal cut. The idea of a cut is to put the content of a post behind a link, so that people can decide whether or not they want the pictures to show. If they do, they will simply click on the link and, voilá! The pictures will show.
WHEN TO MAKE A LIVEJOURNAL CUT?Whenever you post several large pictures (or, as a rule of thumb, whenever you post art altogether), whenever you post fiction or writing, or icon posts that have
over three icons. Livejournal cuts are also specially advisable when the pictures are of a mature subject (I mean, even if such things are locked for the community, imagine yourself, as a member, surfing your friend list at work, and finding yourself with a picture of France being
France, just as your boss shows up behind you.)
Why is that sleazy, hairy man fondling that Italian's nipples?! is the last thing I'D want to hear from anyone in my workplace.
HOW TO MAKE A LIVEJOURNAL CUT?It's recommended, by the way, that you do your posting on HTML mode, rather than Rich Text mode. Though the latter may seem easier, the result will often produce broken code, which is unsightly, greatly offsetting any visual benefits the Rich Text editor may produce. To switch to HTML, simply click on the green-circled option while making a post:

Now, how to make a lj-cut, proper.
Livejournal cuts are done by placing two tags. One to "start" the cut (defining where things will start being "hidden") and one to end it.
Example:<lj-cut text="My art is behind this">
YOUR ART GOES HERE.
</lj-cut>
Notice that the last tag has a "/" before the lj-cut words. In HTML, that means it's a closing tag.
Also, did you see the first tag has a bit that says text="", with something inside the quote marks? That's the text you want to show up on the link. Now, a working example:
( This is a journal cut. Click on me! )Also, remember to
practice things on your journal before you post on the community if you're not sure how it will look. Simply choose to make those practice entries private, so that you won't bother your friend list, and see how they look.
HOWEVER, EDUCATION ONLY GOES SO FAR and though I'd love to be forgiving (let's face it, when you post something, you want to get back to LJ later to read all the comments you got on that art you worked SO hard on, not find out it's been deleted!), after this post, I will be a little more strict on cut failures. Those posts will be deleted (with a reminder that you can repost them later), to avoid inconveniencing friend lists. Every minute a badly formatted post goes on is a minute someone, somewhere, is grinding their teeth because their surfing experience just came across a speed bump. I hope you understand.
Thanks for listening! I hope this is helpful!