Balkhis - Vision For Success

How to add email subscription box in your blog?

I have mentioned it multiple times before on my posts that giving your users another way to subscribe will just increase your subscriber count. One of the extra ways other than just feed readers is to give your users an option to subscribe via email. If you want to increase your RSS Subscribers read the post.

This tutorial was requested by one of my loyal readers and a good online friend Nabil from Enkay Blog.

*Requirements:

Must know how to edit html and CSS. Photoshop skills are a plus.

Services

You need to start burning your feeds. I am assuming that you are already doing that. If not please go and sign up with one of these services. Preferably Feedburner because this tutorial is using feedburner as an example.

So lets go into your Feedburner Account. Click on the Publicize Tab

Publicize tab in Feedburner

Email tab in FeedburnerLook on your left hand sidebar and you will see an option that says “Email Subscriptions”. Click on that and Activate that service. Once again make sure you activate this service. And then Copy and Paste the codes shown in the box below to the file you desired.

Email Code in Feedburner

The next step is creating graphics in Photoshop or any other software. I will not show you how to do that because you can learn that on your own. But I am using an image which you can use. (This image doesn’t use any icons, everything was made in Photoshop by myself, so feel free to redistribute as long as the link back to this post is there).

Email Code in Feedburner

If you want you can simply Download the file, and copy and paste from there.

CSS Requirements

Now you need to open your css file. Copy and Paste the following Code below.

Class Left will help your submit button to float left.

.left{float: left;}

Subbox is the class that wraps everything around for this box.

.subbox{
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
height: 136px;
width: 375px;
float: left;
}

Subscribe class contains the background image for the email box.

.subscribe{
float: left;
width: 303px;
height: 58px;
background: url(images/emailbg.png) no-repeat;
border: 0px solid #000;
}

Input Subscribe defines the css values for the input email form.

input.subscribe{
background: transparent;
border: 0px solid #000;
width: 285px;
text-align: left;
margin: 20px 10px 0 10px;
height: 19px;
color: #50699F;
}

HTML Codes

Open the file where you want to place the codes. Most likely it is sidebar.php but wherever you like. Then put the codes like the one below:

<div class="subbox">

<form style="margin: 0; padding: 0;" action="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open(‘http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=1631142′, ‘popupwindow’, ‘scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520′);return true">

<div class="subscribe">
<input type="text" class="subscribe" name="email"/><input type="hidden" value="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~e?ffid=1631142" name="url"/><input type="hidden" value="Balkhis – Vision for Success" name="title"/><input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/>
</div>

<input type="image" value="Subscribe" src="http://www.balkhis.com/tutorials/emailsubscription/images/but.png" style="border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;" class="left" />

</form>

</div>

Whatever you do make sure you change the important information.

FeedID: 1631142 (This is mine) So find this number and change it with yours.
Title: Balkhis – Vision for Success (This is mine) So change it to the one you like.

Having done that, you are good to go.

This tutorial is over and you now have a email subscribe option on your blog.

Live Preview

Well if you don’t want to follow everything, I have prepared a file for you to download that contains all the codes, so you can copy and paste without making any errors.

Download Now at Balkhis

Remember: These files are free for personal and commercial use. Don’t sell these. If you decided to redistribute, please use the download from Balkhis Server and make sure you put a link back to either this post, or Balkhis homepage.



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Balkhis Sweet Monday Link Roundup – 8/25/08

Today is a Monday. Can you believe it? The weekend is already gone. I was particularly very busy. As you can see, Balkhis already have a new design (Reasons why I changed the old design). Today is the first day for school. Atleast for University of Florida Students. My classes doesn’t start till 11:45 therefore I am up and working. Well lets look at some of the nice reads that I came around.

30 Tips for Exploding Your Site Traffic

13 Shortcuts for Wordpress that you should know – The list now contains 19 I believe.

Is Facebook Advertising for you?

20 Possible ways to Optimize your Blog


Top 10 Tools and Firefox Addons for Digg

15 ways to Piss Off an Internet Marketer

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

Thats all for this Monday. If you wrote a good post and think that it should be listed on Balkhis. Feel free to send me an email via contact form, and I will take a look into it.



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Balkhis in Blue-Navy Theme

Well, As I have mentioned in my few posts before that Balkhis Crew was working on a redesign for this site. We have finished the work. This theme comes with alot of new editions. My goal is to constantly update the site and get rid of all the technical issues that my past theme had.

I am sure you guys are probably wondering why the change in design?

Problems with the Old Design

  1. Not Compatible with All Browsers – Firefox 3 had some minor issues with the design. IE 6.0 was a mess.
  2. Slow – Past design was using alot of images therefore the load time was high, so some of my audience were unhappy about that.
  3. Issues with Padding – As I was using word limit plugin to display the excerpts from each category on homepage, sometimes due to the use of images, the padding wouldn’t work out right.
  4. Multiple other minor problems.

I would like to thank all of my regular users who has supported me with their honest feedback and reviews. There were some other sites that pointed out my mistakes as well. Thanks alot to Nabil for bringing the load time of all sites together, so I could see where I stood among the rest.

I am open to all feedback. Even though we have tested the design extensively, certain things can only be tested with a live display. So I would like to apologize in advance for any inconvenience during our upgrade and fixes. Please use the contact form to report any problem.

Usually, I like to code my personal projects in private place, but this time was a bit different. I went through this design step by step, teaching some of my friends who wished to learn html and wordpress. It was a pleasant experience, I think it would be fun if I get to do that with a group of around 15 – 20 people. We got alot of feedback while we did that. Every minor bug was detected because there were many different eyes, but I think there is always something that is left out and thats why I depend on you guys.

So help me get this site to the next level. Did I mention with the rate Balkhis is going, I should get around 35,000 uniques this month :)



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Tip Sunday – Shoemoney.com

Well I am a regular reader of Shoemoney. Shoemoney have a contest where he is giving away his shirt to one commentator a day. Usually I am not very lucky to get picked in random drawings, but I surprisingly won a shirt.

Well I got in my mail, and you know I do Tip Sunday so people get free promotion if they send me gifts.

Well I am wearing his shirt today. Went to Subway, Walmart, Publix, and Gym. So he got some exposure. See some of my photos in it.

Tip Sunday - Shoemoney

Tip Sunday - Shoemoney

Well thats all for Tip Sunday. If you want free promotion at Balkhis then read this page.



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Robots.txt Guide for WordPress – Avoid Duplicate Content

Robots.txt Guide for Wordpress - Avoid Duplicate ContentToday, I got an Instant Message on msn from a regular reader. They suggested that I should write a decent article on Robots.txt because he was searching and could not find a good one. So I decided that would make a good topic on Balkhis SEO Section. First what you should do is view my Robots.txt. Now you can copy and paste the entire thing for all I care. But it wouldn’t make sense if you don’t understand what it is doing.

The main purpose of Robots.txt is controlling the Search Engine bots. This file single handedly controls what Search Engine bots can index and what they can’t index. This file plays an important role in avoiding duplicate content.

Hint:

You use Disallow: to Disallow files. (Disallow: /page/)
You use Allow: to Allow files (Allow: /about/)

The main thing you need to know in the robots.txt is that the $ sign at the end means file extension. So like I have on Balkhis /*.css$.

Now lets go onto analyze some of the important parts of my feeds that deals with Duplicate Content.

Disallow: /category/ – This code prevents a whole heck of duplicate content. Because your category contains the exact same thing as a single post page does. So you don’t want bots to see this.

Disallow: /page/ – I have mentioned this multiple times that archives are duplicate content. Pretty Obvious. So add this one as well.

Disallow: /tag/ – I don’t know if you are using tag or not. Just add it incase if you ever do decide to use it. I have tags on my Archive page and my search page, so I have it there. Because content categorized by tags are still the same content.

Disallow: */feed/ – Personally I feel that users should pay more attention to my blog rather than my feeds. So I have all feeds blocked.

Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$

I don’t think that spiders should be allowed to see any of your javascripts, css, or include files let alone letting them index it. So block these off as well.

Disallow: /*? – This code doesn’t index any url that have a ? mark in it. So use this one also.

Now I hope you know what my robots.txt is doing. Now feel free to use it as a sample one for your site.



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