Today, I’m unveiling the New Voices blog badges for 2011. These badges can link your blog directly to your entry to help people find your chapter. You can find them at the bottom of this post along with instructions on how save and insert them into your blog and what to do if they won't centre or fit in your sidebar. If you have any trouble, please let me know in the comments because I'm happy to help.
From September 13th the New Voices Wall of Fame will be back and YOU can be on it. The Wall is a great way celebrate hitting that submit button and you shouldn't underestimate that achievement. Public forums are a scary business and it takes a lot of guts to enter, so i hope you've got a mini bottle of champagne on standby.
The Wall will help people find your entry and last year we formed a mini support group and there were a lot of helpful and encouraging comments left by members of The Wall at other members entries. So, if you'd like to be on The Wall just leave a comment with your name and the name of your New Voices entry (so I can find it and link it). Plus, this year you’ll also get a shout out on Twitter.
Speaking of Twitter, today is also the official launch of my Twitter account. I’m now an active Twit and you can find me @laceydevlin or click on my crazy new friend below to follow me. You know you want to ;-)
I’m looking forward to reading your entries and I hope you enjoy the blog badges!
INSTRUCTIONS & TROUBLESHOOTING:
To save a blog badge:
1.Right click on the badge
2.Click‘Save Image As...’
3.Select the file where you want to save the image.
4.Click‘Save’.
To add a badge to blogspot (ORIGINAL interface):
1.Go to your New Voices entry and copy its address. You can paste this into a Word document for safe keeping if you wish.
2.Sign into your Blogspot account.
3.In Dashboard click the ‘Design’ link (toward top of page)
4.Select‘Add Gadget’
5.Select‘Picture’
6.The‘From Your Computer’ option should automatically be selected, if not, select it.
7.Click‘Browse’ and find the saved blog badge image.
8.Then click ‘Open’
9.Paste the address of your New Voices entry into the Link box.
10. Click ‘Save’ and you’re done!
To add a badge to blogspot (NEW interface):
1.Go to your New Voices entry and copy its address. You can paste this into a Word document for safe keeping if you wish.
2. Sign into your Blogspot account.
3. Select your blog and then the 'Layout' link on the sidebar
4. Select ‘Add Gadget’
5. Select ‘Picture’
6. The ‘From Your Computer’ option should automatically be selected, if not, select it.
7. Click ‘Browse’ and find the saved blog badge image.
8. Then click ‘Open’
9. Paste the address of your New Voices entry into the Link box.
10. Click ‘Save’ and you’re done!
Why won’t it centre in my sidebar? *wails*:
1. The image has a width of 200 pixels to fit the average sidebar. Yours may be larger or smaller. If this is the case you need to adjust the size of the image in a graphics program. This can be a program as basic as paint (which can be found on any Windows computer in the Accessories folder on the Start bar so no downloads are necessary to do this).
2. First you need to know the width of your sidebar. If you do go to step .
3. To find the width of your sidebar sign into your blogspot.
4. Click on ‘Template’.
5. Click on the ‘Edit HTML’ beneath your current blog template.
6. You will then get some scary message about only advance users being allowed to play with html but since you won’t be making any changes you don’t need to worry. Click ‘Proceed’.
7. You need to scroll down until you find the coding that reads (look for the red because the rest varies per template):
#sidebar-wrapper {
width: 200px;
padding-right: 10px;
float: $startSide;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
background-color:none;
8. Make a note of the width. In the example it’s 200px.
9. Now open Paint
10. Open your saved blog badge.
11. Click ‘Resize’ on the toolbar.
12. Where it says ‘by’ select “Pixels”
13. Where it says ‘Width’ type in the width of your sidebar.
14. Save the image and you’re done!
15. If you’re still having trouble and curse all electronics the world over, feel free to leave me the address of your blog and a way of contacting you in a comment (or email me directly) and I’ll send the modified image along.
