Link Parties and Buttons... What To Do With Buttons?

While I would like to think that all of you are interested in learning new things no matter what the content, I am sure some of you may not really find this post compelling.  Sorry.  If you do not blog, and you have no interest in html, see you tomorrow and have a good day!  If you do blog, and/or are interested in html, stick around today while I talk about finding the space on your blog for other people's buttons.  (If you want to know about making your own, I recommend going to Oikology)

As you may already know, I started this blog in December of last year.  I wanted a creative outlet where I could share my latest projects.  I was overwhelmed at the number of followers many bloggers seemed to have, and I had no idea how I would ever get anyone besides my friends and family to check in with what I was doing (which would have been ok, but the more, the merrier right?). 

Then I discovered link (or linky) parties.  Are you familiar with this phenomenon?  Link parties allow people to showcase their projects or blogs on other blogs.  Many people host parties one day a week, and then pick favorite links to feature.  This is a great way to get more traffic to your blog, and get more followers.  What I really love about new followers, is they often leave me comments with their blog, and I find wonderful new blogs to follow myself.  I am always so excited to find a new crafty online friend to inspire me.

I slowly began linking my projects up to a few parties here and there, and more people invited me to their parties.  Most bloggers want you to link back to their blog (usually with their button) from your post or homepage.  I am currently linking to quite a few parties, so I have quite a few buttons.  It seemed excessive to put all the buttons on each post, so I had them on my main page for a while.  Then I decided that I would create a link parties page for others to look at and find parties.  When I first started, Jamielynn's link party page was the most helpful to me (I didn't start with all of them, but picked a few).  The problem was that I had several parties I really like to participate in, that wanted more than just a mention on the link page.

What to do?

I saw several people who had taken the buttons for the link parties they participated in, and shrunk (shrank?) them to much smaller sizes.  Then, they don't take up a ton of room, but they are still visible and clickable.  I couldn't find a good blog about changing this, but I was able to figure it out.  It's actually very simple to do.  Are you ready?

I have my buttons all in a widget on my sidebar.  To do this, add an HTML widget.  You can title it anything you want.

Click on Edit, and copy the button code for each button from the blog where you party.  There are two ways to change the size.  The first one is to take the height and width they already specified and change it to the size you want.  Most of my party buttons are now 50 pixels by 50 pixels.

If the button does not already include code for size, add the highlighted text before the closing html.

It's as easy as that.  You can play around with different sizes.  I am not sure if I love the 50x50.  I like how they fit together on the sidebar, but I don't know that I like how small they are.  I might change.  What do you think?