Chapter 12. Building the Sidebars
In This Chapter
Creating badges and widgets for your blog
Finding your blog sidebar template
Letting readers subscribe to your blog by using e‐mail
On a blog, lots of valuable information is contained in the sidebar. A sidebar is a column to the right or left of the main content of your blog.
Usually blog software comes with some content already in the sidebar, like links to your categories, archives, and RSS feed. But you can include a lot of other items in your sidebar. Many bloggers use sidebars on their blogs to have a little fun. They recommend books they like or let folks know what music they're listening to.
In this chapter, I talk about how to add some of these great items to your sidebar, starting with some terrific tools and walking your through a bit of code wrangling.
If you don't get enough sidebar fun here, don't miss Chapter 19, which has a bunch of other neat tools you might enjoy using.
Adding the Usual Suspects
Sidebars usually contain a mix of meat and potatoes features, and neat extras. Strike a balance on your blog that gets readers the basics and also plays up your personality. Figure 12-1 shows the sidebar for the Blissfully Aware blog written by Joshua Lane (www.blissfullyaware.com).
Figure 12.1. Figure 12-1: Blissfully Aware has a great design that uses two sidebars on the left of the layout.
Usually blog software comes with some content ...
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