All About Kimberly

My Life, My Loves, My Story

Tag Archives: buttons

New Page to My Site!!

Since I’ve started dabbling more and more in some graphics, I decided to create a new page with my designs. You’ll notice the new link up top in the linkbar.

So far I’ve posted the “I Comment You Follow” buttons I created today. In addition, you’ll find buttons I created for Janet and Catherine over the last couple weeks. And finally, I actually created another website for a local friend, Coyote Pass ATV Park, and I posted the banner for that site.

I created the theme that I use here on this blog and intend to start working on some other themes when we get back from Florida so if that works out, I’ll be sure to post those also!

I Now Follow, Do You?

Note: I thought that this was so important (as many other bloggers may not know this) that I have made this is a temporary sticky post, please see below for newer posts.

I’ve heard that saying, “You Learn Something New Everyday” all my life, and actually found that it is true more often than not. Today was a big learning moment for me though. I learned that the comments on my blog are no follow. I understand what no follow is, and I understand that are Google Ranks are at least partially based on the number of links into our blog. I understand big companies maybe having no follow on their comments, but as a Woman and Mommy blogger, I’ve learned we are a community, and I want to do my part for helping out. If you leave a meaningful, non spam message on my blog, I think you deserve the link back to your blog. As a community member that’s one thing I thought I was doing to help out other women and mom bloggers, but today I found out that if you don’t have a plugin to follow, you don’t follow. That’s right. If you are using WordPress (I actually think this is true of most of the blogging platforms), it by default puts no follow on it’s comments. I’m glad that I discovered that today.

After making the discovery, I started searching for plugins. I read about many different ones and decided on Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin. Why? Well while there were some more simple looking plugins out there to make your links no follow, what I liked about this one is that it allows for some customization that I thought looked real appealing. For example,

  • Your links are not followed until you’ve left 3 comments (you can increase this to up to 10 if you like). This encourages readers to come back and become regular visitors instead of just seeing the “I follow” button and dropping a comment for the link. They must take a moment to actually read a few of your posts. I think this is fair.
  • If you go more than 14 days without posting (think family emergency), your blog is considered inactive and new comments will not be followed until you are back and posting. While this may seem extreme, it’s actually for your protection. While 14 days isn’t that long, what if you are gone longer? Say months? This will stop your blog from just being a dump of comments from those seeking links in to their site.
  • You can deny follow to those that leave “long” names. This is not one that I’m using. I think I put 50 in the option here. It seems that some people though don’t want you to leave your name as I frequently do (Kimberly @ All About Kimberly). I do this because Kimberly is a common name, and I want blog owners to know who I am, but if you don’t like this, then I guess you can turn it off.
  • Comments can be manually marked no follow if you do want to keep the comment, but have reasons to want to no follow it. Lucia’s Linky Love gives you this flexibility while some of the other plugins didn’t.

But then I wanted to make sure that you guys knew when you came to my blog that I do in fact now allow links that follow you back to your blog. I did a search for some type of button to put on my site, but all I could find were some pretty simple ones that just didn’t speak to me. So I’ve been at work this afternoon and designed some “I Follow” buttons. You are welcome to use these buttons on your blog, but I would appreciate it if you’d link back to me. I’m going to do a page with these graphics also so you can come back and find them (though that might have to wait until I am back from Florida (WHERE I WILL BE IN THREE MORE DAYS!).

Photobucket Photobucket Photobucket Photobucket Photobucket Photobucket Photobucket

How To Put A “Grab My Button” Link on Your Blog

I’ve seen these all over the place – you know where they show you a picture of their button and then in a little scrolly box underneath, you can copy and paste the html language on your blog so that you can insert their button, linked to their site on your blog. In particular I’ve seen this on contest blogs where you can earn an extra entry to their contests if you place their button on your site. I got this great idea that I would add this to my blog since I had created the button for MomDot, but it proved a bigger challenge than I expected.  I consider myself a pretty good web searcher, but I simply could not find instructions for this. The problem? I simply didn’t know what these were called so I had no idea what to search for.  I finally stumbled upon instructions though, and it’s now here!  Yep – look over at the left side of my blog, and you’ll see my handy dandy “Grab My Button” thingy! (yea, even after finding instructions and creating it, I still don’t know what to call it.)

Since I had such a hard time finding it, I wanted to be sure to share the process with my readers in case you are wanting to add this to your site.

How to Add “Grab My Button” To Your Sidebar (or even a web post)

**These instructions include the HTML language for this task.  In WordPress, you could type this into a post in the HTML view or add to your sidebar by adding a textbox and including the entire code. If you use something other than WordPress, I’m not sure where’d you would place this code, but you should still be able to use the code whereever you can post html code and have it shown on your site**

Step 1: Add a picture of you button (so people know what they are grabbing)
To do this, you’ll create and upload your button either to your blog images file or an outside source such as photobucket.  You’ll need to know the exact location of your image.  You probably know this code, but just in case, the HTML for inserting the button linked back to your site:

<div align=”center”>
<a href=”http://www.YOURWEBSITE.com” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://www.THELOCATIONOFYOURBUTTON.jpg”></a>
</div>:

For an example, this is what mine looks like:

<div align=”center”> <a href=”http://www.allaboutkimberly.com” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://www.allaboutkimberly.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/aakbutton.jpg”></a> </div>

Step 2: Adding a Text Box with the Code for your Button
This is where I was running into problems. I didn’t realize it was a text box/area. The code looks almost identical to the code you used above except you have to surround it with the text box/area html <form><textarea>. A complete example:

<div align=”center”>
<form><textarea rows=”6″ cols=”19″ readonly=”readonly”><a href=”http://www.YOURWEBSITE.com” target=”_blank”><img src=”www.THELOCATIONOFYOURBUTTON.jpg”></a></textarea></form>
</div>

The command rows and cols defines how large the box will be. You can change these numbers as you see fit to adjust the size of your text box. The first number (rows) defines how tall the box will be, and the second number (cols) defines how wide the textbox is. The next part (readonly) is optional. You could delete the entire command and it would still function; however, I chose to include it as it prevents someone from accidentally hitting a button and changing the code during the copy/paste process. The <ahref….> is what actually appears in the text box.  Here is my actual instructions:

<div align=”center”>
<form><textarea rows=”6″ cols=”19″ readonly=”readonly”><a href=”http://www.allaboutkimberly.com” target=”_blank”><img src=”www.allaboutkimberly.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/aakbutton.jpg”></a></textarea></form>
</div>

When you put all of this together, this is how it looks,

All About Kimberly

Pretty simple, huh?  I thought so.  If any of this isn’t clear when you go to apply it, please let me know. I’d be glad to help (and modify my instructions for future users).

Reference: Tricks for New Bloggers

July 4, 2009 Update: Having Problems?  If you are having problems making this work, you are free to contact me, but try this first!  Copy and paste code into Notepad BEFORE you paste into your site.  It is important that the quotation marks (“) go straight up and down – not at an angle.  I can not figure out how to undo the angles on this page so you may have problems copying and pasting straight from it.  If you paste to a text editor like Notepad first, you should be ok.

Guess what? I decided to create another tutorial.  Would you like your favorite website buttons in your sidebars to scroll so they don’t take up so much space?  Well check out my How to Create Scrolling Textboxes tutorial.