Sidebar Links

Here's how to add links or any other text to your sidebar:

First, go to your blog admin page; the easiest way to do that is to log in at http://www.wou.edu/blogadmin and click on the name of your blog.

Next, look in the middle of the left column of buttons; click the "TEMPLATES" button. This will take you to a list of templates. Click "Main Index" to go to the edit screen for that template.

Don't make any changes to the top parts of the form unless you are sure you know what you are doing. The important stuff is in the big text box. Before making any changes, I recommend backing it up! Select the entire contents of this box, copy it to the clipboard, and paste it into an empty text document. Save the document some place where you will remember it later. If you ever get this template messed up, you can go back to the file, copy the stuff back out, and replace everything in this text box with the file contents. (If you don't understand this part of the instructions, you probably shouldn't be trying to add links to your blog.)

Once you've got it backed up, look for the following text, about halfway down:

Below that, paste in the following HTML code:

Of course, you can change the word "Links" to whatever you want, and change the link addresses and text as well! Bill and Joe probably wouldn't mind if everybody linked to their blogs, but I'm sure you have your own ideas for places to link to. :-}

Make sure to put a blank line below the inserted text, for readability. If you want more than one list of links, just paste in that block of code multiple times. Note that the links may look a bit more spread out in your blog than in mine; that's because I also messed with my blog's stylesheet to tighten things up a bit. I'll talk about some stylesheet tweaks later.

That's all there is to it! I know some people have requested a way to set up links that does not involve HTML editing; I will see if I can come up with something over the summer.