Sqwink Album Art Blog

If you are anything like me, you’re always looking through other peoples’ Blog sites and seeing all those lovely Feed Buttons appearing on their Blog. You know the ones, like these:

These button links allow web users to Subscribe, Add, Syndicate or Link to your blog via a variety of online services, including Google, Yahoo, Newsgator, Technorati, Windows Live and many more.

If you would like to see how I have implemented over 30 of these buttons, scroll down to near the bottom of my blog. Here, you can clearly see how these Feed Buttons can be implemented - and the best part is, it only took me a few minutes to set up, and I’m NO web-coding expert at all!

Update: This is how I had my blog initially set up. However, because I write blogs with large images(like in my CD Cover Reviews), my blog took ages to load. So now, as you may see, I have universal “add this buttons” instead (A service of Addthis.com). Now my page loads faster, but Addthis doesn’t allow you to add feeds to half the services available. But for me, it is a good compromise. I’d stick to using single buttons if you don’t use a lot of images in your blog.
Now, here’s what you need to do to add Feed buttons to your Wordpress Blog:

1. Firstly, you need the HTML code for you Blog. There is a Web Site called TopRankBlog.com which allows you to select the Feed Buttons you want on your Blog. There is an option named ‘blog specific’ to give you code especially for WordPress, MovableType and Textpattern uses, I checked that also. To go to this feature and get your code, go to the TopRankBlog Button maker page here.
2. Once you have allowed the RSS Button Maker to generate the code, copy it and save it in a text file so you will always have access to it.
3. Now it’s time to place the HTML code into a template in your blog. Personally, I prefer to see RSS Feed Buttons in the Sidebar of a blog. So, I placed it in mine too! How? I opened the sidebar.php file of my Wordpress Blog ( wp-content/themes/[your chosen theme]/sidebar.php ) and pasted in the code where I wanted it to appear. If you haven’t already altered this file, a good place to add your code is straight after the list attributes on line 68. Obviously, it’s your Blog so stick them where you want! Depending on your coding skill level, you can customise the appearance of the RSS Buttons as you like. I just added a line break after each one to leave a gap in-between the buttons.

That’s it! I hope this is a help to anyone wanting to add RSS Feed Buttons to their Blog. If you have any questions or comments on this post, I’ll get back to you a.s.a.p.

>>Blog Post by Andrew kelsall, Sqwink Design

Have you browsed the internet recently looking for ‘Logo Design’? If so, you will have seen it all…”Logo Design for 100 Bucks”, “Logo Design for $49″…”Cheap Logo’s, Guaranteed”! Will we see ‘Creatives’ soon designing logo’s for a Penny?!

The way I see it, there is a gradual degrading of not only the price of good design, but the whole nature of it. Everybody ‘wants in’, but only a percentage have the necessary skills to truly create good designs.

It’s all well and good that people designers offers these services cheaply, but when a good company needs good design - their business may suffer from a quick design fix due to naively choosing the wrong designer.

This is just a quick rant, I know…but I had to get it off my chest.

>>Blog by Andrew Kelsall, Sqwink.com