Workarounds: Minor Changes to the Blog

by Nina

When I changed the format of the blog at the beginning of the New Year to the dynamic format, I received some requests for adding or changing blog features. Because certain features just don’t work with the dynamic format (I’ve still got them in my template but they just don’t show up on the blog anymore), I was stymied about what to do about most of them. And I even blogged about the typical questions I was getting (see Friday Q&A: Can You Change Your Blog Format?).

Since then I’ve discovered a few workarounds that allowed me to make certain requested changes.

Type Size. First of all, I increased the type size of the blog. Although I can no longer control the type size precisely (as I used to be able to), I was able to switch the type size from “normal” to “large.” The choice between normal and large was a rather drastic one, but I made it in the hopes that it would make the blog more readable on smaller devices. And, so far, the feedback I’ve gotten on this change has been good.

Email Subscriptions. Although the ability to sign up for email subscriptions via Feedburner is still available from the blog, it’s not immediately obvious how to do it. And although I’ve added a page to the blog that explains how to subscribe, the supplementary pages are no longer shown on tabs at the top of the blog (a change that happened after I switched to the new format—argh!—sometimes they just change features without notice) so readers aren’t looking at the supplementary pages as they often used to. (To see the supplementary pages, hover your mouse over the Pages tab at the top of the blog.)

However, just very recently I stumbled on the HTML code to include a link to the Feedburner email subscription service on a web page, so I decided to add the email subscription link to every blog post. It looks like this:

Subscribe to YOGA FOR HEALTHY AGING by Email  

When you click on this link, you’ll see a new window that provides you with access to the Feedburner service:

At this point you will have to go through the process of filling out the Feedburner form and verifying your subscription request as I’ve explained in How to Subscribe.

Facebook Link. Then—duh!—after I started adding the link to the email subscription service on every blog post, I realized I could add a link to our Yoga for Healthy Aging Facebook page as well. It looks like this:

° Follow Yoga for Healthy Aging on Facebook 

If you want to follow us on Facebook (we post several times a day there, with links to our current post as well as older posts, news of the day, and so on), click the Like button on our Facebook page and then click the downward-facing triangle on the Liked button:

This will display a drop list. Click “Get Notifications” on the drop list to ensure that you’ll receive our posts in your news feed.

Well, that’s it so far for my workarounds! But if you have any recommendations for more features I can add (with techniques for adding them), please let me know.

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