Everybody’s got one, do you?

It’s one of the cool things about blogs.  You can read them in your very own “feed reader”.  And for those who do this, it is quite likely the ONLY way they will read your blog.  So, we need to make sure that your blog is EASY PEASY for others to subscribe to.  (Subscribe = how they grab your blog and feed it to their reader.)

1.  Find an image of those RSS buttons. Here’s over 35 styles, each with 8 or more different colors and designs.  I’ll use one from my photobucket account.  You may use this one too if you like.

Once you have selected your image, you need to copy the location like this:

<img src=”http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll40/o2cathy/blog%20artwork/feed.png” alt=”button” />

If you have one uploaded to your blog, go to your “manage” panel, and find the image in your media library.  Copy the url (location) from that image.

2.  Find the Address of YOUR feed. Wordpress publishes several feeds for you.  They have their own names, and you can see where they are coded in the header of your blog (if you look under View Page Source).

If you are using the feedburner widget, and have a feedburner url, use that instead.  It will be:

www.feeds.feedburner.com/mommymotivation.

In your page source it will be something like this:

www.mommymotivation.me/feed/rss/.

Or, if you are NOT using permalinks, like this:

www.mommymotivation.me/?feed=rss.

There are several options that you can use, and 3 or 4 different feeds to access.  Find more options on the wordpress manual, here.

3.  Put these two things together in a text widget. In your design admin tab, under “widgets” select the sidebar that you’d like it to appear in.  Then select the “text” widget on the left.  Open it up, enter a title and your feed details like this:

<div id=”rss” style=”text-align:center;”>

<img style=”border:none;” src=”http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll40/o2cathy/blog%20artwork/feed.png” alt=”button” />  <a href=”www.mommymotivation.me/feed/rss” title=”feed”>Subscribe to my Feed.</a>

(Replace the red text with the URL’s that you found in step 1 & 2.)

Sit back and revel in the fact that you did something nice for all your loyal fans today.

Cheers!

Filed under Must Have Plugins, a light brush of code, using themes, wordpress basics | Comment (0)

Breast Cancer Awareness for Bloggers

Hello bloggers!

Pink for October is a website that is dedicated to increasing the awareness and education of peeps about Breast Cancer.  Last year over 3000 websites went pink. From the Pink for October site:

Web sites will Go Pink during the month of October to bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, get people talking about breast cancer, and raise money for research.

But to be clear, raising money isn’t the primary purpose of this web event.

The hope is that you turn your site pink (in whatever way works for your site), go out to that World Wide Web thing and educate yourself about the multiple issues related to Breast Cancer, then take that newfound knowledge and tell someone else what you’ve learned.

We hope that you will:

1. Turn your web site/blog pink (however you like, it’s up to you).
2. Educate yourself about the multiple issues related to breast cancer.
3. Take that newfound knowledge and teach someone else what you know.

Now, you can turn your site pink in any way you like - just a title or text, add a pink ribbon (they have a few cute graphics on their site too), or you can add a new theme.  I designed a theme for self-hosted wordpress bloggers at Healing Graphics and Designs.  You can preview it here.  And download here.  Did I mention it is FREE? 

Cheers!

Cathy

Filed under Uncategorized, using themes | Comment (0)

The scoop on Widgets and Plugins

I had an interesting question from a client last night, wondering how come her gorgeous sidebars disappeared when she put widgets in them. Here’s the scoop:

Sidebars: Most of the time, the theme you are using gives you two options. First, you can just leave the sidebars without widgets and the default stuff will show up. Usually Categories, Archives by month, Meta Data, etc. And second is to use Widgets.

To use the default sidebars:

1. In your dashboard, go to [Design] -> [Widgets].
2. Select the first sidebar from the drop-down list at the top of the right hand side.
3. If there are boxes / widgets in that column, click on [edit] -> [remove]. That one box will disappear.
4. Continue until all the boxes are gone.
5. Go to the bottom of the [widget] screen, and click on the [save] button. It irritates the hell out of me when I forget to do this. Not that I, Master Cathy, would ever…

Widgets: Essentially these are little pieces of code. Developers know what pieces of code do what, and where they should go. So you don’t even have to cut and paste these babies. They’re wrapped with a cute bow, and tagged, “Plugins.”

Some math for you: OKay maybe not.
I was going to give you my best Einstein mathematical formula, but I don’t know any. Darn!

Widgets: those pieces of code that come within your Wordpress Download. Let’s call them “W”. Sounds mathematical, no?

Plugins: those pieces of code that do NOT come with your initial Download. We’ll call these “P”.

To use Widgets (W):

1. In your dashboard, go to [design] -> [widgets].
2. Select the first sidebar shown on the right hand drop-down menu.
3. Now drag and drop the boxes from the left over to the right. I know! Drag & Drop, right? Doesn’t it make you want to kiss those ppl at Wordpress? Me too. Oh. Just me?
   
4. There are options to play with in each of those widgets. Then save each widget.
5. When you are finished, at the bottom of the page, there is a [save] button - use it!
6. If you have more than one sidebar, just follow these steps to use widgets in each and every one of them. Use as many or as few as you like.

To use Plugins(P)

We will go through this in depth later, I think that Heather has already addressed a couple of plugin must-haves. But for now, you need to know that the number of widgets that you have in that left column is only a fraction of what is available. There is a whole ‘nother geekier world of plugin-developers. They write those beautiful packages. To find out what I’m talking about, go to the Plugin Repository and search for “widgets”. All those plugins can be added to your sidebar widget list! (W - did you remember?)

They need to be downloaded, unzipped, and uploaded back to the server, just the same way that you do for themes. But these are not themes. They are plugins - (P). And we’ll go over this in depth in the coming days.

Now, you know the first letter of both Plugins and Widgets. That’s quite mathy of you, I think. I’m such a good teacher.

Filed under using themes | Comments (2)