icon geekery

[egypturnash]

Idle morning experimentation with replacing LJ's user icons.

It appears to associate them entirely by name. If you upload an image and name it "foo", make an entry and a comment explicitly using it, then go change the name associated with it, the previous uses will revert to the default icon. But they'll still show a rollover of "username: foo".

Even if you delete the image, it still has that "username: foo" rollover on those entries and comments.

And if you upload a new image and name it "foo", then all those entries and comments will show up with it. Assuming you get the name exactly the same.

It's kind of a shame renaming the icons breaks the connection. I'd like to rename a few icons, but I don't want to break the use in my old entries and commenting - there's a certain layer of meaning that image choice adds.

Comments

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

It'd be nice if LJ gave you a choice of updating the old icons to the new one, or leaving the old ones alone. The name should just be a human-understandable "handle"; the system should use some sort of unique ID or something.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It's a nice system if you understand all that in advance and plan accordingly, which I managed to do to some extent; on at least one occasion, I've given an icon two keywords (separated by a comma), and then later I made a new icon and transferred one of the keywords to it.

For instance, this icon has three keywords: 'math', 'toys' and 'tangrams'. At some later date, I might consider making a new icon and calling it 'math', leaving this one to be just 'toys' and 'tangrams'.