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dakotamidnight
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| Posted: June 03 2010 at 10:00am | IP Logged
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Does anyone know how to put a sidebar with the books of the month, season, etc on a blog?
I want to put a row of what books we're using, etc on the left-hand side like this one: Shower of Roses but can't figure out how to do it easily on blogger!
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Erin
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Dakota
Are you meaning a straight written list or with pictures?
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Erin
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Paula in MN
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Jessica at Shower of Roses uses Typepad, so her list is part of their blogging software platform. I think for Blogger you need to locate the program you want to use and then upload it to your blog.
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 Paula
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organiclilac
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Librarything, Shelfari, Goodreads, etc. have widgets that you can put on Blogger. I have used Goodreads, and it allows you to put only books with a certain tag into the widget, so that you can select just part of your library.
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SallyT
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If you click your "customize" link, it will show you your blogger layout with various places where you can add gadgets, including third-party HTML code (buttons, widgets, etc) as well as link lists. If you click "add a gadget," you'll see a list of the various things you can put in your sidebar.
In the blogger templates I've had, you only get one sidebar, usually on the right, though I've seen blogs whose owners obviously know enough about writing HTML stuff to add a left-hand sidebar (or sidebars on both sides). That would not be me! But I've found that blogger will let me do pretty much what I want -- though I do admire those Typepad blogs.
Hope that's helpful without being too elementary!
Sally
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Becky Parker
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I don't mean to hijack here, and I'm hoping to actually add to the question but how do you get the little pictures to come up? Like Sally, how did you get the little picture of the baby onesie or the tote bag to appear in your side bar? If I link to something, say from Amazon, all I get it the title that I can click on and go there, but I want a picture. Is there something special that I have to purchase for that ability? Would something like Librarything, as Tracy mentions, provide that?
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Mackfam
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Hi ladies.
I've done this on my blogger blog. The only way I was able to have a sidebar with pictures of books was to get an Amazon Associates account and use their code to get the images up on my blog. Then, I cropped the size of the box that would show up on the sidebar...cropping the box small enough so that Amazon's big "buy it now" button is cropped out of the image and all you see is the book cover and the title.
If you're willing to dig in a little you CAN do this! Sure wish there was an easier way with blogger, but until then... This thread gives detailed how-to instructions for Blogger blogs. Hope this helps! 
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SallyT
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| Posted: June 05 2010 at 2:35pm | IP Logged
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What Jen said. The baby onesie and other pics come straight from a Cafepress store I started, putting my (pretty amateur!) photos on various items. I'd copy an image of the item from the storefront, upload it into an "add picture" gadget in my sidebar, include a link to the item, and caption it.
I don't have book images in the sidebar right now, but I do also have one of those Amazon Associates accounts, by means of which can insert linked images and widgets into my sidebar using the "third-party HTML" gadget. I never thought to crop out the "buy" button, though -- that's a good idea, if what you want people to focus on is the image of the book.
I suppose you could just grab a book image from Amazon, upload it as a picture, and provide a link to the product page -- the gadget has a way for you to do that, as I've done with my Cafepress things. With Amazon Associates, if someone buys something through your link, which is coded for your Associates account, you get a little kickback for providing advertising on your site. I'm pretty lackadaisical about that kind of thing, but it is occasionally nice to get a little ka-ching in the tip jar.
I guess I'm a weirdo for not finding Blogger all that limiting -- for a while I did some paid blogging using a Wordpress platform, hosted on a much larger site, and I hated it. My computer is old and slow, and I had to invent all kinds of Byzantine methods for uploading and posting pictures, which I did for every post . . . writing a simple post wound up taking hours, on top of the searching for things to write about, and it all drove me just about insane. Then that dried up, and I went back to my old personal blog, and lo and behold, all kinds of upgrades had happened, and even on this clunker machine, everything seemed so magically easy!
Sally
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4Real Forums : Tea and Conversation
Topic: Blog Help?
