Blog Add-ons 101

I've been playing around with this blog template for a few days and while, yes, it still looks like a plain old blogger template, I've added a couple very simple add ons to enhance my blogging experience. Today, I'm going to reveal the secret of one of these tools, tomorrow I'll give you tips for the other (if I were a magician, I would be blacklisted for this).

1. "Add This" - You might have noticed that fancy button at the bottom of each blog post, this is my attempt to strongly encourage readers to bookmark this blog (or this blog post) on a variety of social bookmarking tools. I can see how many times that button has been used to tag my blog posts and to what social bookmarking sites (but don't worry, i can't see who did it or when - this isn't 1983 - not yet anyhow).

But how did I do it? Am I some HTML genius? One quick chat with our coding experts at the office would let you know that, no, I am not. I just followed these easy steps.

Go to AddThis and create a free account, then generate the code for the button you want (the site will step you through that and you can choose the look of the button as well as what blogging platform you use).

The following step should work for AddThis as well as for any other bookmarking, or other, little button that you want to appear at the footer of your post.

To insert the code into your posts, edit your template and select "edit HTML" - here you'll see a bunch of code - the easiest way (on a Mac) to look for the code you want is to hit Apple and "F" key. This will create a little pop-up window at the bottom of your screen. The code that you are looking for is

<div class='post-footer'>

Once you've found that line of code, simply copy (Apple and "C") and paste (Apple and "V") the code from AddThis (or whatever tool you used) right after that line of code.

Viola! You should see the button the next time you publish a post. Now all you have to do is sit back and wait for the traffic to come in.

And, if you're hungry for more Webby stuff, try this Web Technology guide.