If you came here from Blog Treader, don't worry, you're in the right place. :) I'll be revamping and relocating these instructions, soon.
The Blog Quilt is simple and free. All you have to do is get me the information about your blog badge and then take the Blog Quilt badge and put it on your blog. That way, everyone's blog has a link to the
Blog Quilt and in return, the Blog Quilt has a link to everyone's
blog. It will be one big collection of blogs. Cool, huh?
First thing's first. You need a badge. If you have one, great! Send me an email to s.cole.garrett@gmail.com with your badge html code and I'll add it to the quilt! Then, all you have to do is take the Blog Quilt badge and post it on your site (It can be found on the home page, near the bottom).
What if you don't have a badge? Well, there are two things you can do:
#1 Follow the instructions below to make your very own blog badge and then email it to me.
or
#2 If you're having trouble doing it on your own, I'll help you. Send me an email to s.cole.garrett@gmail.com. You will at least need an idea of what you want your badge to look like and what you would like it to say.
Instructions for making your own badge
Feeling technologically brave? Don't worry, it's not all that difficult. I promise. I'm going to walk you through how I made the badge for The Blog Quilt.
Step 1 You need a picture, a square one, to be exact, around 150 by 150 pixels to 175 by 175 pixels. If you have a picture that's not square, you can crop it in a later step. This is what I made in paint:
Step 2 You need a site to host your picture online. I'm going to show you Photobucket (
http://photobucket.com/). It's free. (Who doesn't love free?) Go there. This is what photobucket looks like, so you know you're in the right place:
Step 3 Log in to photobucket or if you need to, start a new account,
then log in.
Step 4 If this is your first time, you need to create an album (the bottom arrow points to that). After you have an album, you need to upload your choice picture by clicking the "Upload Images and Videos" button (the top arrow). A box pops up for you to find your picture. Go find it and click Open.
Step 5 The file will load and then you'll be asked to choose an album and save. Select your Album (1 below). Check to make sure you got the correct picture (2). Save (3). You don't have to worry about adding tags, a title, a description, or anything like that.
Step 6 If your picture is exactly how you want it already, you can skip this step. But I want to add words to my picture and photobucket lets you do that. This is the screen you should see after you saved your picture. If you want to make changes to your picture, like I do, click the little "edit" button above your image.
Step 7 You can skip this step, too, if your picture is already exactly how you want. Anyway, there are a ton of great tools Photobucket has for you to change up your image. I softened mine up a little bit and added the text I wanted. Afterwards, you can either save the changed image over the original or save it as a new one (the buttons can't be seen in this picture, but they're just below what you see here). I saved it as a new one.
Step 8 Okay, this is the part you
really need from Photobucket, once you have your picture the way you want it. From whatever page you're currently on in Photobucket, you should see a button that says "view album". Click it and you should come to something like this:
Move your mouse over top of the picture you want and you'll see that box magically appear. Move your mouse down and click one time in the box labeled "Direct Link." Once it's highlighted, copy it (push Ctrl + c). Or you could right-click and choose "copy" from that list.
Step 9 Open a word processor. I'm using Microsoft Word to show you. Paste the text into the new document. After that, come back here and copy the following text and paste it below what you got from photobucket in the new document:
<a href="YOUR BLOG'S WEB ADDRESS" target="_blank"><img src="THE STUFF YOU GOT FROM PHOTOBUCKET" border="0" alt="Photobucket" width="165" height="165" /></a>
Your document should look something like this:
Step 10 You need to put it all together, now. Number 1 in the picture above is what I got from Step 8. (Yours will look slightly different than mine because it's your picture, not mine.) You now need to copy the link from photobucket (1 above) and paste it in the place of the badge code (2 above) where it says THE STUFF YOU GOT FROM PHOTOBUCKET. Then, you need to go out to your blog's home page and copy the web address and paste it in the place of the badge code (2 above) where it says YOUR BLOG'S WEB ADDRESS. Make sure you get everything inside the " " quotation marks. They are important for reasons you probably don't care about. You should have something that looks like this (Of course, with your blog address and photobucket link):
Step 11 Pat yourself on the back. That's the html code for your blog badge!
What now?
Just send me an email (s.cole.garrett@gmail.com) with your brand spankin' new badge code and I'll add it to the quilt! Then you add The Blog Quilt badge to your site! The code for that is near the bottom of every page. Add an html gadget to your blog and just paste The Blog Quilt badge code in there.
Any questions? Ask via the same email as above.
I hope that was helpful!
