fancy pants: subscriptions and a how-to

I just learned a new bloggy thing! And, I always love to share new bloggy things with y’all (even though it’s totally likely that you may already know this…)

My friend Kayla Aimee keeps me looking and feeling techy and she helped walk me through what is really a simple process.

Ladies (and the occasional gentleman): you can now subscribe to my blog by email!

I know, I know. I’ll wait to say anything else important until the cheers die down a bit.

Oh, stop it, I’m blushing.

Okay. I thank you for your respectful silence.

You will see now in my sidebar to the right that I have a happy little button that looks like this:

Yes, this lovely button is the result of hours and hours (but not really) of me toiling in Photoshop. So fancy, I know.

So now, you can click on that little sidebar image (or the one in this post) and you will be directed to a page wherein you can subscribe to my posts by email. I don’t know everything about this, but I believe that means that every time I publish a post, you will receive it as an email in your inbox. It’s kind of like getting an email from me, except not.

So, if you are interested in a series I’m doing (like the Sewing 101 class that’s coming next month) and would like to have it delivered directly to you, this little feature is for you.

And like I said, I don’t know a lot about this or what it will even look like (or if it will cause my actual blog traffic to plummet), but I do know that it means I can’t keep going back to my posts after I publish them to fix my spelling or to sound like less of an idiot. And, I can’t be so wishy-washy about my post titles either. (I have a terrible habit of going back and changing my post title after I’ve published. I don’t know, sometimes I just can’t commit!)

So, that’s that! Just one way I like to make your lives a little easier.

And if you’d like to make this happen for your own blog, here’s a (very) rough tutorial on the matter:

1. You’ll need to set up a Feedburner account at feedburner.google.com

2. Once you do that an you’re in the “my feeds” section, it should look like this:

3. Click on your blog name and then, in the “publicize” tab, click “email subscriptions”. You’ll need to activate this option, just follow the prompts and then you will see this screen (with your own name and such, of course).

4. Now you can publish your link one of two ways:

Copy and paste the html code from that first box on the feedburner page into an html box in your sidebar. (Is that clear enough? The brevity of that step assumes that you have added something in your sidebar at some point before this tutorial. If not, say so and I can try to be more clear.) This should turn up a generic form that will do the job. (and you can always get fancy within that code if you want to mess with border widths and colors to match your blog theme.)

-or-

Design a button that is just the right size for your sidebar and that jives with the colors/theme of your bloggity blog. Say whatever clever thing you’d like to say in there to woo your readers to subscribe to your posts by email. You know, something like, oh I don’t know, “Subscribe to Finding My Feet by email”. Yes, it’s going to be difficult to beat that, but you can try.

Then, scroll down a little further on that feedburner page you’re on until you see a box right beneath the words “Preview Subscription Link”.

Grab just the link info from that box – that’s the magic link that gets your readers where they need to be.

Then, using your pretty little image and that magic little link, create a linked image in your blog’s sidebar.

And – I believe – that should do it for you! Let me know how it works or if I can clear anything up!

Have a spectacular weekend, friends! You are fearfully and wonderfully made by a good and loving God. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of that. :) Cheers!

Related posts: