Thepipbuzz

This article shows how to change the accounts presented in an AddThis Follow gadget which has already been set up on a Wordpress-based website . (Note:   this is only relevant for Wordpress.org users.   Wordpress.com users do not have the same freedom to add or configure plug-ins.) The AddThis plug-ins for Wordpress provide several functions.  One is a Follow gadget, which lets you offer links to your account on other platforms (eg on Twitter, Facebook and Instragram), so that people who are interested can subscribe to you there, and get updates from you even if they don't visit your blog or website regularly).  When you install and activate this plugin, there is a screen where you can choose which other platforms to show, and say what your address on those platforms is.    After you have set up the plug-in, then you an add the AddThis Follow widget to your site,   This gadget displays an icon for each tool which you selected, and each...

The Follow-by-email gadget uses Feedburner's email-subscription service.   It's very easy to add to your blog, but there are some things that you need to think about if you are using it to deliver blog-posts to your followers by email. The Follow-by-Email gadget is a very simple way to give your readers access to blog-updates by email: it delivers a message in their inbox every day that you post. But to decide if it's a good thing to use, to get good value from it, and to troubleshoot any problems, you need to understand a little more about how it works. And, since it uses Feedburner, this means understanding how Feedburner works, too. What is Feedburner The Follow by Email gadget uses a product called Feedburner to manage the list of people who have followed, ie subscribed to your blog.  Feedburner was originally a tool to enhance the RSS subscriptions that website-owners delivered - see Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for your blog   for info about RSS...

This article is about centering gadgets from 3rd parties that you install onto your blog. Previously, I've described how to put HTML code from a 3rd party into your blog . When code like this is put into a gadget , one common question is "how do I center it?" There are (at least) three options for doing this, ie for putting a gadget into the middle (horizontally) of the area it is located in.   These are described below. Option 1: Centre all the gadgets in your blog To center-align every single gadget in your blog, just, add a CSS rule to your blog .  The rule to add is: .widget {   text-align: center; }  This will centre the contents and title of every gadget on your blog. Option 2: Only center-align the specific gadget To only centre-align one gadget, which is made from HTML/Javascript code, you can just put the gadget-code from the 3rd party (eg PayPal, Amazon, etc) inside a centering statement, like this: <div style="text-align: center;"> PUT THE...

This article explains how to use Blogger's Post Editor to get the HTML code that you need to put a picture into your sidebar (or header or footer, or anywhere else a gadget can go). The Picture gadget is the normal tool for adding a picture to your blog's sidebar . But sometimes you want more control over the picture size or behaviour.  Eg, you may want to have two pictures very close to each other and guarantee that they're the same size. To do this, you need to get the HTML code for the picture, and then put it into your blog as an HTML-gadget.  Fortunately, Blogger's Post-editor make it very easy to do this without writing the code yourself. Using the Post Editor to generate the HTML for a picture 1  Start a new Post   (you're not ever going to publish this:  it's just a work-area) 2  Don't enter any text:   just use the Picture icon on the toolbar to add a picture .   Blogger will prompt you to upload the picture, or to choose it from ...

This article is about how to put an item (any type of gadget) above the Title section in a blog made with Google Blogger. If your blog has a layout or designer theme / template , then it most probably has a nav-bar at the top of the screen, followed by a Header section showing your blogs title & description, or a custom header image if you've uploaded one. And even if you go into the place in the layout-designer where you can re-arrange the layout by drag-and-dropping items, you cannot drag any gadgets to above the header . But this is easy to change, provided you are willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your blog's theme . How to allow changes above your blog's header Follow these steps to make it possible for you (or any blog administrator ) to add gadgets to the area about your blog's heading section: 1  Edit your blog's theme  in the usual way 2   Find this code in your theme: <b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets=...

This article is about how to set up a gadget / widget in Blogger so that it is only visible on the first place that a reader sees when they visit your blog (often called the "home page").   It is one of a series of articles about controlling what goes on the homepage of your blogspot blog. Front Page Bob By Paginator (Own work)  [ CC-BY-3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons There are a number of reasons why you might want to put a gadget only the screen that shows when a visitor first navigates to your blog's home page. You may want to show a welcome message, or a topic-index page, or to give a view of your recent tweets or some other RSS feed.     No matter what the reason, the process is very similar: How to make a gadget only appear on the first page Note:  in Blogger, the words "gadget", "widget", and even "page-element" all mean the same thing.  I generally use "gadget", because the Page Elements tab currently says "Add a Gadget...

This article explains a quick way to find the widget that you are looking for in the list that Blogger displays when you use the Add a Gadget tool. When you start to add a gadget to your blog, Blogger opens a new window listing all the existing page-elements that are available (in two tabs) and allowing you to upload a widget of your own (in a third tab.) Currently, the first tab (called Basics) has 28 gadgets listed, while the second one (called More gadgets) has 899, displayed in pages of 30. There is a search-for-gadgets feature available on the second tab - but it doesn't return gadgets that are listed on the first tab.   And even when it did, I didn't recommend it, because sometimes 3rd party gadgets with similar names were listed before the official widgets developed by Blogger. So, to find a gadget that's listed in the Basics tab, you have to scroll down the list until you see the gadget you want.   However there are some problems with this. Given that there ar...

This article shows how to add a button that takes a user straight to Google Contacts to your blog or website.   It also distributes a picture that you can use in other places (eg your PC desktop) to make your own Google Contacts icon. Most people have a button on their computer or smartphone, which they use to start their email.  For some, this goes straight to their Gmail account in a web-browser, while others use an system like Thunderbird or Outlook to look at their email messages in a Gmail account and/or in email accounts they have with other services. If you use Gmail as your email system, then Google also gives you an address book, which they call Contacts. This is not the same as the address book in Thunderbird or Outlook etc, which is saved on your local computer.   Instead, the Google address book is saved on the internet, in your Google account. Google Contacts is tightly linked to your Gmail account, and the way that most people access it is by: Going to...

This article explains why it's a good idea to keep a backup copy of settings for your gadget, in particular for HTML/Javascript gadgets that have complicated, hard-to-regenerate, code. Blogger's backup tools let you take copies of: your post-contents and (separately)  your template.  Some 3rd party backup tools (eg HTTRack) let you make backup copies of how your blog looks - including the consequences of displaying your gadgets. But as far as i know, there is no way that you can back up the settings (ie parameters or configuration) that are stored inside the widgets on your blog. This can be a problem if you accidentally remove a gadget, or if you have an HTML gadget and get the code wrong in it: Blogger is quite unforgiving sometimes, and the HTML/Javascript gadget editor simply removes any code that it doesn't understand. In some cases, this isn't not a big problem  eg if you show a picture as a gadget , then it's generally easy enough to work out characteris...

You can put a picture anywhere in your Blogger blog that you can insert a gadget - and you can make it link to a post in your blog or to any other website. The Image gadget Dry dock in Claddagh Basin A very simple way to put a picture into your blog is to use an Image gadget (previously called a Picture gadget). This is a tool that Blogger provides to make is easy to add a picture that shows up on all screen and is linked to somewhere. Often gadgets (sometimes called widgets or page elements) are put on the sidebar - but in many blogger templates they can go in other places too (header, footer, etc). Follow these steps to add a picture gadget in Blogger 1  Make sure you know where the original picture is  and that you have copyright permission to use it . 2  Copy the location (URL or file system full path-name) of the picture - and remember whether it's on your computer, or on the internet. ( This article tells you how to find the URL of a picture that's alread...

This Quick-tip introduces the new Google+ plugins that Google released in late June 2013 Recently, Google+ Developers blog announced a vastly improved set of Google+ plugins for use with websites. Most (all?) of them are not yet available as Blogger gadgets, so you have to get the code from the Google+ resources site , and add it to your blog like you would add any 3rd party code. The new options include a more "industry-standard" follow on Google+ button, and new badges for Pages, Communities and Hangouts, as seen here. (I've previously explained why you might like to have a G+ community alongside your blog .) They are configurable (size, dark/light, style, etc) - but  you need to work out how to apply the configuration settings to the code.   That said, I've added them to this site without any configuration (see the top of the sidebar), and the default options appear to work well. And it's not actually as hard as it looks: in general you just follow the pat...