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Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Link Parties and Buttons... What To Do With Buttons?

While I would like to think that all of you are interested in learning new things no matter what the content, I am sure some of you may not really find this post compelling.  Sorry.  If you do not blog, and you have no interest in html, see you tomorrow and have a good day!  If you do blog, and/or are interested in html, stick around today while I talk about finding the space on your blog for other people's buttons.  (If you want to know about making your own, I recommend going to Oikology)

As you may already know, I started this blog in December of last year.  I wanted a creative outlet where I could share my latest projects.  I was overwhelmed at the number of followers many bloggers seemed to have, and I had no idea how I would ever get anyone besides my friends and family to check in with what I was doing (which would have been ok, but the more, the merrier right?). 

Then I discovered link (or linky) parties.  Are you familiar with this phenomenon?  Link parties allow people to showcase their projects or blogs on other blogs.  Many people host parties one day a week, and then pick favorite links to feature.  This is a great way to get more traffic to your blog, and get more followers.  What I really love about new followers, is they often leave me comments with their blog, and I find wonderful new blogs to follow myself.  I am always so excited to find a new crafty online friend to inspire me.

I slowly began linking my projects up to a few parties here and there, and more people invited me to their parties.  Most bloggers want you to link back to their blog (usually with their button) from your post or homepage.  I am currently linking to quite a few parties, so I have quite a few buttons.  It seemed excessive to put all the buttons on each post, so I had them on my main page for a while.  Then I decided that I would create a link parties page for others to look at and find parties.  When I first started, Jamielynn's link party page was the most helpful to me (I didn't start with all of them, but picked a few).  The problem was that I had several parties I really like to participate in, that wanted more than just a mention on the link page.

What to do?

I saw several people who had taken the buttons for the link parties they participated in, and shrunk (shrank?) them to much smaller sizes.  Then, they don't take up a ton of room, but they are still visible and clickable.  I couldn't find a good blog about changing this, but I was able to figure it out.  It's actually very simple to do.  Are you ready?

I have my buttons all in a widget on my sidebar.  To do this, add an HTML widget.  You can title it anything you want.



Click on Edit, and copy the button code for each button from the blog where you party.  There are two ways to change the size.  The first one is to take the height and width they already specified and change it to the size you want.  Most of my party buttons are now 50 pixels by 50 pixels.



If the button does not already include code for size, add the highlighted text before the closing html.



It's as easy as that.  You can play around with different sizes.  I am not sure if I love the 50x50.  I like how they fit together on the sidebar, but I don't know that I like how small they are.  I might change.  What do you think?

9 comments:

  1. Thank you! This is awesome. I love how yours look! I like how small it is, but also you could fit three 65x65's and have 3 across instead (assuming your sidebar is 200px) that would keep them small but make them a bit more readable... for those who don't already recognize the button itself.

    Thanks again for the how-to! Watch for this to show up on our blog soon... hee hee :)

    -Annie @ {PeppermintPlum}

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  2. Thanks so much for sharing, I can't wait to try this!

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  3. Well thank you sweet lady! I just tried this and I really like the way your looks. Mine are jumping around (take a look and tell me what I did wrong, if you have a chance). Next you can tell us how you got the buttons under your header.LOL Your layout really looks nice and neat.
    Thanks again for sharing, Vicky

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  4. Seems simple enough... until I tried it. (you know there's always one in the crowd) lol Ok, so none of my buttons had a size, so I copied and inserted the size (using the above mentioning of 60 instead of 50). I titled it "testing" on my blog--- but I've got nothing. Nothing shows up? Now I am all kinds of confused (bear to mind this is my first week up and running...)

    Thanks for sharing this though! :D
    -T

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  5. Thank you!!!! I don't have near as many buttons as you but I just did this to mine and now they're all the same size. Thanks! :)

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  6. This is really smart, I have a linky page but this looks clean! I don't like when parties make you put it in your post, it makes it messy! Anyways I saw you guest posting over at Sumo Sweet stuff and we have like a million things in common so I had to comment and follow you of course! My husband and I just moved to Denver in October, he was a cheerleader in college..shhh don't spread it around (ha), and the people we moved out here with (we came to church plant) are from Texas and she was a high school cheer coach and he was the one who got my husband into it in college, they stunted together! (I was in high school but that just doesn't seem to count in comparison! ha ha) and I also started blogging in December! Crazy! Anyways I just wanted to say hi and say we are like blogging twins or something..ha ha! We are really loving Denver so far, what about these awesome spring days? Right!! Love em!!

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  7. I'd been wanting to do this too, but hadn't ever figured it out - great tip. Stopping by from TGC's Creative Girls:)

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  8. This information is exactly what I have been looking for. Thanks so much I'm so darn excited about this.
    Rose

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Thank you for leaving a comment--I love to hear what you think! I try to respond to any questions within one day.