This was an interesting question that Camille from Shopaholic asked me. She had been playing with Entrecard for a few days and wanted to make it acknowledge people who dropped their card on her blog. She’s using WordPress for her blog and we’ll be using that as an example of how to accomplish this; however, the idea translates well to any other platform you’re using as long as they can display the contents of an RSS feed. If you’ve never used Entrecard before, here’s the description of what it is, right off their website:

Entrecard is your business card 2.0. It’s a 125×125 image which represents you and your blog. Its part advertisement, part business card. It comes with a widget you place on your blog, so that others can leave their Entrecard for you. You can also use Entrecard to promote your blog and launch free advertising campaigns.

Anyway, back to the question, how do we list the latest people who dropped their Entrecard on your blog? Well, the tick to doing this is an feed that Entrecard provide of your latest droppers. To get this, log into Entrecard and look for the RSS icon in the top right hand corner:

Right click on the RSS icon and Copy Link Location (or Copy Shortcut if you’re using IE). This copies the location of the RSS field to your clip board.

Once this is done, log into the Administration section of your WordPress blog, go to Design and Widgets and add an RSS widget to your sidebar. Once you have this, click on Edit on the widget to change the settings and paste in the RSS feed URL that you copied in the previous step:

You can change any settings you want to add as much information from the feed as you would like, but I’ve kept it simple and will be just showing the name of the website.

Once this is done, don’t forget to Save Changes and you can return to your blog to see the finished result:

Interesting technique, isn’t it, and not that hard (easier than sorting through the HDMI switches behind my TV anyway). I’ve got it running on my own blog, so pop by and drop a card! I’ll drop you one back

Leo, down at WorkConnexions, wanted to know how he can add a LinkedIn button to his website. These buttons are designed to link to your profile on LinkedIn’s website and help you promote yourself and your services.

Adding these buttons isn’t hard, as LinkedIn provide the code for you themselves. You’ll need to navigate to Your Profile on the LinkedIn website and look for the section that says “Promote Your Profile”. Here’s a snippet showing what it looks like:
(screenshot)

Click on “Promote your Profile” and you will be presented with a selection of buttons you can use and the associated code. Just copy the code to your website and you’re all set to go. Good luck!

Elizabeth down at Table for Five asked the question above as her blog had some ugly white space in the sidebar and she just couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. Her page appeared like this:

note the white space marked with the red marker.

Turns out that she is using Widgets on the site and the area below the white space consists of a Text widget. The thing about this widget is that it has no title, so the widget code creates a big white space instead of this. How can this be fixed?

The answer is to update the widget code and enable it to handle blank headers in a more graceful manner. Here’s how to do this:

• Click on your Plugins Menu and choose Edit Plugin.
• Select the Sidebar Widgets plugin for editing
• Search for “function widget_text” and this should take you to the following function:


function widget_text($args, $number = 1) {
extract($args);
$options = get_option('widget_text');
$title = $options[$number]['title'];
if ( empty($title) )
$title = ' ';


• Change the line $title = ‘ ‘; to $title =”; (that’s 2 x single quotes)
• Click Update File to save the plugin

Switch back to viewing your site and you should see that the problem has been fixed.

Please Note: The change above involves direct changes to your widget.php file. Please make sure that you have a backup of your plugin folder before you do this.