Getting Techy: Domain, Disqus, & Link Within

Today I wanted to point out some new “techy” things that I have added to the site over the past week.

The first thing is the obvious deletion of the .blogspot.com! The recent www.simplyadapting.blogspot.com is now “Simply” www.simplyadapting.com 

I had been looking into buying my own domain for quite awhile now and decided to take the dive when I saw that Go Daddy had a coupon for domains. I figured this would be super difficult to figure out but honestly I got it up and running without any headaches. I’m not going to sit here and say for un-tech savvy bloggers out there that this was an easy task. It was easier for me because I’ve been half-ass playing around with HTML code since I was in middle school. Yes… middle school when “Angelfire” was the site to be on. As long as you can follow directions you will be fine. I’m no genius at HTML, I just know the basic codes to look for and how/where to copy and paste code in correctly. For Go Daddy you won’t even be playing with code, it will be more of syncing your blogger site with Go Daddy and vise versa.

The domain cost me $2.00 for the first year and $12.99 to add the second year. For the fifteen dollars I could spend easily at Caribou in a week I think it is better spent here in a domain that I can call mine.

The next thing that I worked on this week was getting a new Comment section opened below my post. I dislike Bloggers Comment content VERY much. I feel like it keeps readers from responding. There are times when I am on other blog sites and I start commenting, then have to select Google to log in, it refreshes the comment box, and then all is lost. All my effort gone. Disqus offers the ability to log in by many different platforms which I like for myself and any readers who stop into Simply Adapting. So please do comment. :)

Another addition to the site would be the Link Within Widget that appears below my post. I love the concept. As bloggers we write all of these post and then after a few days they become old and forgotten. Link Within gives readers the opportunity to see and visit a post you’ve previously written that may be related to what you just posted.

Link Within offers a very simple way to add the widget… unless you have a custom blog design (which I do) causing some headaches to get the photos to appear like they should. Since my design is custom I had to manually add in the HTML code for the Link Within Widget to work properly. Then since I was already dealing with code I decided  to change some additional code to make the images circular instead of square and to also remove the lines in between the images. 

Go to this site for steps on how to add the Link Within Widget, how to move it to below your post, and also how to make the images circular.

My final tech move this weekend was to remove the column lines on my blog. You can see the line in the image below located between the blog post and the right column. That line is now gone.

I want to continue to work on my tech skills to improve my blog without having to pay others for simple fixes. I’m all about paying for full blog redesigns but for these little items I’m hoping to update myself.

Next on my list: Create a Navigation Bar with images that fits well with the theme of the Design already in place.

X Fingers Crossed X