Blogspot Linking

Ok, some of you have trouble or are making claims about not knowing how to link someone else, so I'll put up a little post here about how to add links on your blog. If you're wondering how to link people and whatnot, this is the place for you to check out how to do it.

There are two rather simple methods to set up links to other blogs that are widely used: the first is using blogrolling, and the second is to use straight HTML hyperlinks.

Blogrolling

If you look on the left sidebar of this site, you'll see how blogrolling works. If you want to sign up, just click the powered by blogrolling link. It will give you the javascript code to insert into your template.

HTML Hyperlinks

HTML hyperlinking seems complex at first, but in reality, it's not that hard. This is the format of a hyperlink (note: italics represent where YOU type):


<a href="URL of link">The text you want for the link</a>


So, let's say you wanted to link the main page of this (meaning my) blog, it would look like this:


<a href="http://yearinforever.blogspot.com">What's A Year In Forever</a>


The quotes have to go around the URL (double quotes). Sometimes it works without them, but that will soon disappear with XHTML taking over HTML, so you want to be on top of the change. See? Not to hard. If you were listing more than one link, you'd probably want to add a line break command so that they'll all lay in a pretty little line. To do that, you would just append to all that code (I'll add another link for fun):


<a href="http://yearinforever.blogspot.com">What's A Year In Forever</a><br />
<a href="http://www.google.com">Google. It Rocks.</a><br />


If you put those in, it will look like this on your site:

What's A Year In Forever

Google. It Rocks.


Simple stuff when you get down to it, right?

Great. Now where do I put that stuff?

Well, more than likely, you have something called a "sidebar" in your template code, where all of that fun stuff like previous posts, archives, and the about me section is, depending on which template you picked. In your template, it usually is started by something that reads:


<div id="sidebar">


Below that will be sections I mentioned, probably with tags that look like <h4>, or maybe h1, h2, or h3. These are just various level headings, used as a sort of chapter beginning. Somewhere underneath that sidebar tag, and before the end of the sidebar (represented by a </div> tag below the sidebar div), add your hyperlinks or blogrolling and you should be good to go. Just use your preview button to make sure you like where it is and the code is working properly. You are now fully ready to link all the people you think are worthy.

I hope that helps those of you who have problems with this. Feel free to write and ask any questions, I'll answer them when I can.

Good luck, and link away!