Unless you turn off default icon, that's the only way you can really do it.
You'll have to get the livejournal url of the icon you want to use, and enter it into an "image tag."
To reduce the space between entries, merge this snippet into the stylesheet in your GLOBAL_HEAD:
CODE
table {
margin-bottom: 1px!important;
margin-bottom: 1px;
}
The
!important is for Firefox compatibility. It will use that segment, instead of the bottom one. IE does not understand !important, so it will ignore it, and use the second segment.
CODE
body {
margin-top: 202px;
}
Merge that with your other body coding, in your global_head stylesheet. Adjust the number value accordingly.