The Blogroll

July 7, 2003 Comments Off on The Blogroll

A lot of people have asked how to create a blogroll or where to insert the blogroll once created into the home page templates and/or how to use navigator links with a blogroll..so here are my newbie tips for blogrolls, with a little help from Jake’s instructions on How to create a Blogroll with Radio’s outliner and with a little help from several people on the discussion boards and at Userland. Jake’s instructions has some good information about blogrolls but if you’ve never looked at HTML code or used Radio before it can be quite confusing for a newbie but its a good reference point.

NOTE: I use Windows XP and my instructions are based on Windows XP however whenever I can I try to give Mac instructions but not being a Mac person and not owning a Mac, its sometimes difficult..

Also I plan on adding screenshots soon …

Description of Blogrolls: Blogrolls are a collection of links on the home page of a weblog that point to sites that are somehow related to yours. They serve several purposes, they direct readers to the sites that are important to you, and serve as a set of bookmarks for you. They also help build page rank in search engines for sites you wish to bestow page rank on.
 

Four things you will be doing to add blogrolls to your weblog:

  1. Creating the blogroll and saving it in your www/gems folder
  2. Add CSS codes to your home page template (if you haven’t already done so) – this is for alignment
  3. Copy your blogroll.opml file from your events folder
  4. Inserting your blogroll into your home page template(s)

Basically what you are going to be doing is replacing  your navigator links macro with your blogroll inside your home page template(s) and/or desktop template. Or you can insert your blogroll macro before/after your navigator link if you want to keep the navigator links

1. Creating the blogroll and saving it in your www/gems folder

Open Radio App by right clicking on the tray icon in Windows and choosing Open Radio

borrowing from Jake’s instructions for Mac OS X, click the app’s icon in the dock

Click on File > then New, this will open an untitled blogroll

Add some links and descriptions for the links

Add headers if you want

Change the font colors of your links

Insert lines, code is <hr> for multiple sections

Save As > blogroll.opml    in your gems folder located in your www folder

or once you get the hang of blogrolls and you’re creating multiple blogrolls for different things, save as blogroll_xxxx.opml whereas xxxx represents whatever its for

2. Adding CSS Style Items to the Home Page Template (for Blogrolls): You will want to add .blogrollText and .blogrollLinkedText items to the CSS Style Sheet section at the top of the home page template especially if you want the blogrolls to align the way you want them too.

Open the home page template
Scroll down til you find the following section

.small {
  font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px;
}

   a:hover {
    text-decoration: none;
    }

In between these two items you want to add the following:

.blogrollText {
        font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-weight: bold;
        padding: 0px 0px;
        padding-top: 2ex;
        }
.blogrollLinkedText {text-align: left;
        font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px;
        padding: 0px 0px;
        }

so it will look like this when you are done

.small {
  font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px;
}

 .blogrollText {
        font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-weight: bold;
        padding: 0px 0px;
        padding-top: 2ex;
        }
.blogrollLinkedText {text-align: left;
        font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px;
        padding: 0px 0px;
        }

  a:hover {
    text-decoration: none;
    }

Submit your changes
…..personally I like to do a small section, submit my changes and make sure I haven’t screwed up anything 🙂 by going back to my HOME, posting a test post, and upstream my changes to make sure everything still looks alright.

Inside the .blogrollLinkedText  – I have text-align: left; – this means that my blogrolls will be aligned to the left (thanks to Roger Cadenhead who answered my question on the discussion board – I got this to work this morning). I suppose if you want everything to align to the center you would just substitute center for left or right if you want right aligned text.

3. Copy your blogroll.opml file from your events folder

Wait for Radio to upstream your blogroll.opml file

Go to your Events Folder

You’ll see something like this:

Event What happened Time Secs
Upstream 1 file: mySubscriptions.opml. 11:02:53 AM 1.005
Please notify The FuzzyBlog! 11:02:45 AM 0.616
Upstream 1 file: blogroll.opml. 11:02:18 AM 2.003
Hourly scan 11 channels read, 12 new stories. 10:53:08 AM 7.833

Right-click the link to your blogroll.opml file, and choose:
Windows XP: Copy shortcut
Windows 2000: Copy Link
Mac users Ctrl-click.

What I like to do so I don’t lose my blogroll.opml URL that I copied and also so I have the whole macro code ready to go is to open up Notepad  and paste the blogroll url that I just copy from my events folder into the macro

When you copy the shortcut, what you are essentially doing is copying the URL of your blogroll from Radio’s server..my blogroll URL is

http://radio.weblogs.com/0119318/gems/blogroll.opml

for example the macro is: <%radio.macros.blogroll(“http://xxxxxxx”)%>

whereas xxxxx represents the your blogroll url that you just copied out of your events folder

therefore in Notepad, my blogroll macro will look like this: <%radio.macros.blogroll(“http://radio.weblogs.com/0119318/gems/blogroll.opml”)%>

and yours will look similar except it will have your blogroll url inside the (” “)

and this is what I’m going to be using for Step Four

4. Inserting your blogroll macro into your home page template(s) and/or desktop template

Open your home page template by going to Preferences then Home Page Template. Scroll through your template until you find the following section which will currently have your navigator links macro. You might be looking at this template and wondering where the hell that navigator link is..just keep scrolling, each template has it located in a different place however it is there, I know the first time I looked for it, I couldn’t see it and had to go line by line until I spotted it and sometimes still do especially if I had a new template.

Before:

 <td>
<table width=”169″ border=”0″ cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”7″>
<tr>
<td valign=”top” align=”center”>
<hr size=”1″>
<%navigatorlinks%>
<hr size=”1″>
<br>
 

This is where you will paste the blogroll macro and URL that you copied from your events folder or if you used the notepad concept just the blogroll macro that you have created.

After:

 <td>
<table width=”169″ border=”0″ cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”7″>
<tr>
<td valign=”top” align=”center”>
<hr size=”1″>
<%radio.macros.blogroll(“http://radio.weblogs.com/0119318/gems/blogroll.opml”)%>
<hr size=”1″>
<br>

Categories : Radio Userland