Do you have a Georgia Lou Studios Blogger template and a mysteriously missing slider? This problem first surfaced in October 2016, but my teaching blog slider didn’t go missing until July. I’ve been getting lots of emails about this, so thought I would share a quick tutorial.
You’ll need the code from Georgia Lou Studios Help Page, and less than two minutes to watch this tutorial.
**Always, always, always back up your template first by going to Theme–>Backup/Restore–>Download Theme
Tired of those sad Blogger sidebar labels? Are you ready to make your labels a stand out on your sidebar? Georgia Lou Studios shared this AMAZING tutorial with several options for styling your sidebar labels on Blogger.
The tutorials walk you through different options for styling your sidebar:
The instructions are spot on, BUT if you are not familiar with Font Awesome or playing with code makes you nervous, more support is never a bad thing. Below you’ll find a series of videos to walk you through getting your labels ready, grabbing your colors, and adding the code to your site for four different styles.
Use this website to grab your colors: Image Color Picker
View the icons: Font Awesome Cheat Sheet
View the icons: Font Awesome Cheat Sheet
You know how you have that one drawer in your kitchen that is the junk drawer? There’s some super important stuff in there, but it’s buried beneath tidbits of trash, expired coupons, and random bits of nonsense? And then every once in awhile, you’ve had enough. You clean it up, organize, and get it looking good.
It’s time to clean up your blog’s junk drawer aka the sidebar. Here are five tips for cleaning it up and making the most of that real estate.
This is SUPER simple and should take you less than two minutes. You should have no more than 20 labels on your sidebar, and even that is pushing it. In Blogger, go to Layout–>Labels to edit. Change from show “All Labels” to “Select Labels”. Once you select the labels you would like shown on the sidebar, click save, and you’re done!
Take a good look at every single widget on your sidebar. Things to delete or reevaluate:
•Bloglist feeds for other sites.
•The Blogger followers gadget. That doesn’t even work anymore unless you have a Blogger site.
•Google+ button. If you have anyone on your site that actually wants to use Google+, they’ll find you.
I know, I know. It’s such a nice thing to do. But there are only so many things you can have on your sidebar before your readers eyes glaze over. What they do see needs to be related to your site. You may love a blog or website, but if it’s taking readers outside of your own site, you’re hurting your traffic and distracting your reader from your own content.
Is your sidebar longer than your post feed? Unless you have a brand new blog, your sidebar should not be longer than your post area. That’s a clear sign you’ve got too much happening on your sidebar.
Now that you’ve gotten the nonsense off your sidebar, it’s time to think about what really should be there. What are your top priorities? Probably to help your reader find content, sign up for your email list (if you have one), stay connected with you on social media, and promote your store. Those priorities get lost when your sidebar is an endless scroll of information. Decide your priorities and make sure that is clearly and simply visible.
Step up your Blogger game by .com-ing yourself, also known as redirecting your domain. You absolutely can purchase your domain through Google. It’s pretty easy too. For the majority of people, that should work just fine. If you ever think you may want to switch to WordPress though, it can get a little sticky to make the switch later.
This tutorial takes your through the steps using GoDaddy. There are other places you can purchase from. This is the host I’m familiar with and many people use.
Let’s take a side trip on forwarding vs redirecting (feel free to skip this part):
You want to redirect your domain instead of mask/forward it. What’s the difference? Say your address is www.mycuteclassroom.blogspot.com, and you purchased the www.mycuteclassroom.com domain.
•With forwarding, typing in either of those addresses brings you to the blogspot.com address.
•With a redirect, typing in either of those addresses brings you to the .com address.
Bought a .com and not sure if your site is set up with a redirect or forward? Go to your blogger dashboard and click “View Blog”. Look at the address. If it says blogspot, you have forwarding set up. If it just says .com, you’re all set!
First you need to purchase your domain on GoDaddy. The domain is cheap. They’ll stick you with a bunch of add ons. You do want the privacy add on. Otherwise, people can use this site to look up the name and address associated with the domain. All the information listed for my site is Go Daddy’s information. If I had not added the privacy protection, it would have my phone number, address, and email address listed. Yikes.
Go to Settings–>Basic–>Publishing–>Setup a 3rd party URL for your blog–>Put in the address with www included–>Save
You’ll get a screen that looks like this:
**The second row of information is specific to each blog. I blocked out the actual information from this blog and replaced it with a similar looking but made up sequence.
You’ve got an error, but no worries. We needed that second row of information for our Go Daddy work.
In your Go Daddy account, Click on My Products–>Domains–>Manage DNS
**You can add privacy from here if your need to.
Once you click on Manage DNS, you will be at your Records page. You’ll need those two pieces of information from Blogger.
1. Find the CNAME row with www as the name and @ as the value
•Click on the pencil to edit
•Change @ to ghs.google.com
•Save
**TTL is the amount of time it will take to go live. I select custom and change it to 600 seconds for everything I do. 10 minutes used to be one of the their dropdown options, and it now longer is, but I still change it to that. It may not even make a difference.
2. Click ADD
•Type: CNAME
•Host: the first piece of information in that second row of craziness
•Points to: grab that really long sequence
•Save
**Don’t worry if you get an error message. Just hit refresh. It will be there.
3. Click ADD
•Your will need to do this 4 separate times.
•Each time you will select A as the Type and
your domain with no www (ex: teaching superpower.com) as the Host.
•For Points to, add one of these in each time:
216.239.32.21
216.239.34.21
216.239.36.21
216.239.38.21
•Save each time
•You may get an error message. Sometimes I get it on all four, sometimes I don’t get it on any of them. If you get the error message, just hit refresh and your information will be there.
It will look like this when you are finished:
Go back to Blogger, and click on Save again. Now that your information is all set up in Go Daddy, it will look like this:
•Click on Edit
•Check the box as shown below:
•Save
**FYI-Check your link in Chrome first. It usually works immediately. Firefox usually takes 10 minutes or less, and Safari can take up to an hour.
**If you have confirmed your site in Pinterest, you will need to reconfirm the .com site and revalidate your pins. You can read how to do that here.
Good luck!
If you have a blogger template from Georgia Lou Studios or a WordPress blog, adding in any of the hundreds of icons from Font Awesome is a fun way to break up your posts just like I did in this post.
To get this coffee cup (or any of the hundreds of icons on Font Awesome), all you need is one line of code:
<i class=”fa fa-coffee fa-4x” style=”color: #94a2b0;”>
Here are the pieces you’ll want to change:
•fa fa-coffee
Visit Font Awesome to find the name of the icon you would like to use. Want a shopping cart? Change coffee to shopping-cart. Your code would now look like this:
<i class=”fa fa-shopping-cart fa-4x” style=”color: #94a2b0;”>
•fa-4x
This controls the size. Your options are fa-lg, fa-2x, fa-3x, fa-4x, and fa-5x. Want a larger shopping cart? Your new code would look like this:
<i class=”fa fa-shopping-cart fa-5x” style=”color: #94a2b0;”>
•94a2bo
This sets the color of the icon. You’ll want to use colors that match your branding. Not sure of the hex code for your site? Upload an image from your blog to Image Color Picker to find it. Upload an image or use your site’s address, then just click on the part that has the color you want.
If I wanted to use the turquoise that matches my site, my code would look like this:
<i class=”fa fa-shopping-cart fa-5x” style=”color: #aedad9;”>
If you want your icon centered on the page, you’ll need to add code to the beginning and end that tells your blog to do that:
<center><i class=”fa fa-shopping-cart fa-5x” style=”color: #aedad9;”></center>
•When you add the code, the icon does not show up when you are in the post composing area. If you want to see how it looks, you will need to preview your post. I probably spent an hour on different tutorials because mine “wasn’t working”. It was there the whole time!
•It’s super glitchy in WP. You can’t add them in until after you’ve added all of your pictures. If you add a picture in after the icons, your icons disappear. Super annoying. I like using the AGP Font Awesome WordPress Collection plug-in. It adds the Font Awesome icons to your post editor, so you can add them easily. (See the little FA icon? You’ll just click there.)
You’ll make your selections (notice it uses font size for sizing options), and then either preview or insert. Another bonus? You can stay in the visual editor instead of having to switch over to HTML.
I think their dropdown is kind of a pain when I know what I want. I usually build the first one this way, then just copy and paste the line of short code the rest of the time. Then I can use the Font Awesome Cheatsheet to find the name of my icon and adjust it that way.
That’s it!
Blog designs, SEO, newsletters, improving your blog can quickly get overwhelming. Here are five things you can do to improve your Blogger site that will take five minutes or less each. Totally doable. Bonus points if you do all five.
Think you don’t need Google Analytics? What if I told you your Blogger stats were completely unreliable? They’re basically made of pixie dust.
This is so stinking easy to do:
•Go to Google Analytics.
•Set up your account.
•Click “Get Tracking ID”
•There will be a mess of code on here. All you want to do is copy the little piece under Tracking ID. It will look something like this: MI-54892249-1 (I made up this piece of code, your code will be similar though.)
•Go to your Blogger dashboard and select Settings–>Other–>Google Analytics. Paste your code in and save!
Do you labels list look like a list? Or a 10,000 word essay? Having lots of labels helps with related posts gadgets, but it seriously junks up your sidebar. Plus, your readers are not going to dig through all that.
This one is super fast to clean up. Go to Layout and find your Labels gadget on the sidebar. Switch from “All Labels” to “Selected Labels”. Try to get your list to 15 or less. Save and you’re done!
While you’re cleaning up the labels on your sidebar, how about cleaning up the whole thing? Sometimes the sidebar of a blog is longer than the post section. What are your readers genuinely going to be interested in? This is prime real estate. Make sure important items don’t get lost because you have too many items. (I’m looking at you, blog award from three years ago.)
While you’re looking at your blog, just click on the little wheel beneath the gadget. You can delete almost all the extra widgets and images from there.
So, everyone’s custom pin it button disappeared. The place where the script was stored no longer exists.
You have two options, fix your old one or go with the official Pinterest button. Sadly, I have to recommend the official Pinterest button even though it hurts my soul. You can read more about that on my Rich Pins series here, here, and here.
Even if you’re not ready to conquer rich pins, you still need a pin it button. From your Blogger dashboard, go to Template–>Edit HTML
•Click somewhere inside your HTML code box. Click CMD F (I think it’s CTRL F on a PC) to search. Search for </body>
•Directly above </body>, paste this code in:
Blogger made a few changes that messed up the social shares widgets for people with modern templates from Georgia Lou Studios. The fix is super easy though. Head on over to her tutorial to get those social share buttons back in the correct spot.
