Adding RSS / ATOM feed icon to Blogger / Blogspot

shakir    Information Insemination     blog

While reading the logs of people coming to my website, I found out that some came from Google, searching for how to add RSS feed icon to their blogspot blog. This is probably due to my previous post.

Though I've not been using blogspot as my blogging platform for quite a long time already, I'll just create a short howto here on to do just that.

From your blog's admin panel, go to Settings -> Template. From there click on the "Add a Page Element" link, and select  "Text" from the selections.

On the editor that pops out, fill up the title, and for the content, click "Edit HTML" and add this lines to the text area:

<a href="http://yourblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml">
    <img src="http://www.any-website.com/rss-icon.jpg" />Any text
</a>

You can change http://yourblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml to http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml, whichever that you prefer, and http://www.any-website.com/rss-icon.jpg is a URL to any RSS icon in the net that you prefer (or upload your own)

I hope this helps

Installing Smiletag Shoutbox in Wordpress

shakir    Information Insemination     blog, html, script, wordpress

Smiletag Shoutbox is the shoutbox that I have on my website’s sidebar. I’ve been using it since I was using Joomla for my website, and now that I moved to Wordpress, Smiletag is still my shoutbox of choice.

Installing it in Joomla is very straightforward, while it’s not really the case with Wordpress, as it requires a little bit of coding.

The application can be downloaded from Hivemind’s website (requires free registration)  and it can then be installed as any other Wordpress plugin. The shoutbox however doesn’t immediately show up in the page, and there’s no option in the admin console for that.

To add it to the page we must add some codes, and in our case, to the sidebar’s code. Edit it from the admin panel;

Presentation -> Theme Editor -> sidebar.php

or can be edited with any editor;

/path/to/current/template/sidebar.php

This is an example of a very simple Wordpress template with widget support;

The sidebar uses <ul> for its items, and so we need to add <li> element to add our shoutbox (and probably any other static stuff) to it. We also need to add a header (<h2> probably) for the item’s title, and add the shoutbox’s code to it. The final sidebar should look something like this;

Shoutbox



        
                



        

              Name

              URL or Email

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This might not exactly be the case with every template, but the idea is about the same. Happy blogging!