Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Resizing Your Blog-Love Buttons

Happy Tuesday!!  A few weeks ago I switched my linky party buttons from on each individual post to my blog sidebar.  Once I had all of my party buttons moved, they looked a little cluttered - different sizes and a little big for the space.  Soooo I did what any HTML lovin girl would do, I resized them to a more uniform size.  It's incredibly easy & anyone can do it!  Here's what I did...

Go into your Blogger Layout tab and decide where you would like the list of buttons to appear (in my case it was the left column), and select the [Add a Gadget] button:


Pick the Text Gadget from the pop-up list of basic gadgets:


Enter the title of your list (for this example I'm building my list of favorite blogs) and enter any separating titles in the main body (since this is a favs list, I'm separating by type):


Now for the fun (and really, the most time consuming) part, building out the list of buttons.  I had a mishmash of button links scattered throughout all of my posts.  I just sat down over a few days and slowly copied them one by one into a Notepad txt file so that I would have my list all together.  Toggle to the HTML view by selecting the Edit HTML link on the far right, under the Title (circled by red in the previous picture).  For this example, I only have one button:

A quick note, if your button link has a center tag and you would rather the buttons be left justified, simply remove the center tag and it's matching /center tag.


Now for the simple adjustment - all you need to do is add (or possibly change) a height and width size.  First step is to look for an existing height and/or width specification in the tag.  If one exists, all you'll need to do is alter the numbers.  If not, you simply need to copy in this style="WIDTH: 47px; HEIGHT: 44px"  I used 47 pixels wide by 44 pixels high.  I found it to be the size that worked well with most of my button collection.  You can fiddle with the height and width until you are satisfied with the dimentions:


To view what the button will look like on your page, simply toggle back to the Rich Text view:


And here's what my button looks like on my blog:

(and seriously, who does not love Dana @ MADE?!?)

For any new link up parties, I simply edit the Gadget, add the new button and edit the height & width size...easy peasy :)

10 comments:

Kelli @ WhimsiKel said...

Thanks for the tute! All those screen shots must have taken forever, but this is very well-done!

Alison @ Oopsey Daisy said...

WOW! GIrl, you are good! I love your clean-looking list... now I just have to track down all those HTML codes! Thanks.

Terri said...

Thank you so much. I found you on the Skip To my Lou "Made by you Mondays", this is so helpful. I just created my own blog a few weeks ago and am trying to get the hang of it. This will help, you have a new follower, thanks!
Terri
http://craftyworkinmommy.blogspot.com/

Alison @ Oopsey Daisy said...

Thank you SO much! I just made over my blog buttons and am soooo grateful for this tutorial!! :) You're the best.

Alison @ Oopsey Daisy said...

K, I linked to your tutorial today on my blog:
http://oopsey-daisy.blogspot.com/2010/05/bloggy-news.html

Taylor said...

I just found your blog today and these really stood out to me! I was just about to contact you and ask how you did and and thought maybe I would look around and see if you already did a tute on it, WHICH YOU DID!!!! I found it very quickly, your nicely organized. Thank you so much for sharing the how to. I don't do linky partys as much as I should but this may motivate me to keep up on them!

Fowl Single File said...

I'll join the throng and thank you as well. This was incredibly helpful to someone like me who is intimidated by html. My blog posts look so clean and neat now without a bunch of huge buttons tacked onto them!

Patricia @ 9th and Denver said...

Hi I did this and blogged about it.
Great tutorial!

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for the great tutorial! I am super excited it worked out! I never really blog about blogging, but I was so excited that I posted about it and linked to you...a few times! :)

http://addicted2tutes.blogspot.com/2011/05/blogging-tute-resizing-buttons.html

raising4princesses said...

this helped me soooo much! Thanks!
http://caribbeanmissionarywife.blogspot.com/

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