I just found out that there's a link to this site from Jean's Knitting blog on account of my progress bars. Since it appears that I have been getting a whole lot of hits lately from that one particular link, I thought I should post something on the subject for the benefit of people who may come here in search of more information.
As Jean points out, my progress bars are directly linked to my Ravelry account, so that each WIP listed on the blog has a link to the appropriate project on my Ravelry profile, and (which is even more exciting) any WIP %-completion updates that I make on Ravelry are relayed automatically to the blog sidebar.
I wish I could take credit for this miracle of modern technology, but the code widget that makes the magic happen is NOT my own invention. In fact, there is an entire group & corresponding forum/discussion board on Ravelry called "We <3 Progress Bars." Note that "<3" is text-message speak for a sideways heart = "love". I found everything that I needed right there, in the aptly named Extremely Helpful Thread. Clever Ravelers have devised lots of different variations on the theme of progress bars, some of them very elaborate, including photo galleries and other high-end bells & whistles. It can become quite a project in itself.
Fortunately, the straightforward version that I preferred was extremely simple to bring off. Once I figured out what I wanted and found Casey's pre-packaged code, the actual setup on Blogger took only a couple of minutes. You go to your "dashboard" and click on the "Layout" tab, and then use "Add a Gadget" to insert the necessary code into the sidebar of your blog. Copy & paste. Ta-DAH!!!! I think the only thing I did to customize it was to pick my own color scheme.
So that's the story. Please leave a comment here or send me a Ravelry email, if you have any further questions that I might be able to answer.
Happy knitting!!!
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Thanks for this! And now for a question on a completely different subject -- how did you know I had linked to you? Was it something like Google Analytics, showing hits coming in from my direction? Or is there some automatic way -- there must be -- of being informed when someone posts a link to you?
ReplyDeleteI am a faithful reader here, being a fellow Princess-knitter, a fellow Classicist and a fellow cat-lover.
Hi there. Yes indeed. I subscribe to a free service called StatCounter (http://www.statcounter.com/ ), which tracks all sorts of data about the blog, including the location of visitors (I love looking at the map to see them coming from all over the world) and, among other things, the URL of the “referring link” that led them to me, if there is one. I generally don’t keep close track of the referrals, but I was poking around yesterday and happened to notice a whole lot of activity sent to me by your link. It’s a Brave New World out there, and no mistake…
ReplyDeleteI had no idea that's where those bars come from! I learn something every day. And occasionally it's useful/helpful. <3
ReplyDelete