You’ve been asking, and we’ve been promising! So here we have it, the FBC Member badge for your website.
The badges aren’t mandatory – blog’s are very personal and everyone is different. But many of you have asked if you can show your “colours” so to speak, and we’re happy to oblige!
Installing Your Badge
Installing the badge is quite simple and some of you won’t need a tutorial at all. If that’s you, then carry on! And if you’re using WordPress, just scroll down to get the code you need. For the rest of you, here are instructions for both WordPress and Blogger. All you need to do to get started is right click on the badge to your left and save it to your computer. The badge won’t have the grey border around it – that’s just how our site formats images.
For WordPress
If your blog is in WordPress you will probably want to install it in your sidebar, using a text widget. The first step is to upload the image to your Media library. In your Dashboard, click on the Media button in the left hand menu. When the Media Library page comes up, click the Add New button:
Upload the image just like you normally would and when the screen comes up asking you to fill in the title, alternate text, etc, copy and paste the File URL into a text editor like Notepad (PC) or TextEdit (Mac) – you’ll be needing that shortly.
Next you’ll add a widget to your sidebar. In your Dashboard, select the Widget menu item (located under Appearance) in your left hand menu.
Different WordPress themes may have different widget options for you but to keep it simple, the best choice is to use a standard text widget that’s always available.
WordPress has a nice drag and drop functionality for widgets so just click on the Text Widget choice and drag it over to the right, to your sidebar list. This will allow you to put in whatever type of text or HTML you like, which is exactly what we want.
Now, open up the Text Widget you just added to your sidebar by clicking on the small down arrow in the right corner.
You don’t need to add a title. Instead, you are going to want to paste in that File URL that you saved earlier. But you’re also going to need to add some code around it so that it shows as an image and not a line of code and links back to the Food Bloggers of Canada site for all those curious people who stop by your blog. Here’s what you’ll need:
Make sure you swap out yourblogname with your actual blog name.
And there you go! Now, you might notice that this doesn’t neatly centre your badge in the sidebar. If you want to fix that, you need to add a little bit of CSS. But, that’s not hard. I’ll show you how:
By adding the style div we can “pad” the image so it’s forced to move over to the right. The 75px amount may need to change depending on the width of your sidebar. My sidebar is 300px wide. The badge is 150px wide. 300-150=150 so that means I have 150px of space still available to the right of the badge. To centre it, I need to divide that in half again, giving me 75px. So I added an extra 75px of padding to the left of the image and there you have it! You can go check out my blog to see it in action if need be. Make sure you add the ending div tag at the end of your code!! You can use this little trick for centering other badges you might have in your sidebar as well.
For Blogger
Now, I’m a WordPress girl so I’m not as familiar with fine tuning Blogger. But the easiest way to add the badge is to go into your Design tab in the Blogger Dashboard and select Page Elements and then Add a Gadget
When the Add a Gadget window opens, select the Picture option and follow the instructions for uploading an image. In the link window, add the www.foodbloggersofcanada.com link. Make sure you also add a title!
You won’t have the fine control to place the image exactly how you would like, as you do in WordPress, but you do have a much quicker way to upload it!
And there you have it! A new badge and a little tutorial on how to add a little bit of CSS to fine tune your sidebar. A two for one!
FBC Member Blog Badge (and how to install it!) was written by Melissa Hartfiel, FBC co-founder and author of the food photography blog Eyes Bigger Than My Stomach where she sometimes put her tutorial writing skills to work by writing Adobe Lightroom tutorials. She is a web and graphic designer, WordPress addict, photographer and the resident FBC geek. Melissa lives just outside of Vancouver, BC. Twitter: @mhchipmunk
Ok – I’m an idiot. It isn’t working for me.
I really need to find a WordPress theme I like that allows me to have a sidebar…
Hey Mel
I’ve tried and tried and I can’t get the widget to work! I get a question mark, and when you clink on it, It leads to a dead link
Hi all,
We’ve figured out what’s causing the issue, for wordpress. It’s so silly actually. When you copy and paste the code from here, it changes the quotes from straight to curly. All you need to do once it’s in your widget is delete all the double quotes and then retype them in. They’ll automatically become straight. Programming does not like curly double quotes! It seems to work for everyone who’s had problems so far.
Kudos to whoever figured out it was the double quotes turning curly that caused the problem… That was driving me nutty!
Done and done! Thanks for making the badge for us.
So happy I found this! I am a proud Canadian Food Blogger.
Thanks so much for the widget, great idea!
However, I’m not the most tech savvy and having some issues with the icon display. The actual widget image isn’t appearing, only a broken link icon.
Help?
Hi Valerie – take a look at my comment a little further up. I suspect that’s probably your problem if you’re using wordpress!
Love this badge!
Thank you so much for providing this badge for us all! It’s a great way to identify all the amazing food bloggers in Canada! thank you thank you thank you!
@melissa, thats for the comment about the dumb curly quotation marks and change it to straight ones… that is brilliant!
I just installed the badge onto my blog…yay! Thanks FBC for offering this up, it looks great : )
Hi, I am a new member and just added the badge to my site, but have no control over how it appears, i.e.centered. Any chance of HTML code for the Blogger badge?
Hi Jaquee,
I’m not terribly familiar with Blogger but I think in order to do that you need to host the image in photobucket or somewhere similar and then you can insert it as a text widget, just like the wordpress example – you can probably use the same code but swap out the photo links.
YAY I just noticed this
Love it 
I’ve got the link, but the badge just appears as a little white square… Any suggestions? I use wordpress…
Hi Heather,
I just popped by your site and it looks like it’s working just fine. But let me know if you still think you’re having problems!
Hi. Has anyone figured out how to put the badge in TypePad? Sadly, I can’t get it to work
Yeah – I finally figured it out! (wow I’m hopeless at this techie stuff!). Thanks!
I have tried to enter this several times now and I am just seeing a box with an ‘X’ in it. Ihave removed the curly quotes. Just to confirm this is the code I have entered into the text widget. I have not used the title cell can entered the text into the cell below. My blog is http://www.homespuncafe.com. Is his right or am I doing something wrong?
I can’t see where you’ve tried to install it. if you want, email me at melissa[at]foodbloggersofcanada[dot]com and I’ll try to help you out.
I got the badge installed and it shows but have an x box above it. Still learning the whole website as I go, do you know how I can get rid of that box?
http://www.darlenemorrison.com
I added all the code above into text widget on sidebar .
Hi Darlene. I checked out your site and it looks fine to me. I viewed it in Firefox and Safari. Seems to be working great!
Would love to see a wider image offered. something that fits some of the Blogger templates a bit better.
Can we modify the image ourselves or would you rather we stuck to this image and this image only?
Either way I’ll be proud to be flying this flag.
Just realized I wasn’t logged in.
I was wondering if there were any plans to make a wider version, that better fits some of the blogger templates. If not would you mind us messing with it in photoshop ourselves to get something that fits a bit better, or would you rather we use the logo as is?
Hi Moe,
. You can center it in blogger with a little CSS.
We’d rather you used this one. We’re pretty picky about our branding
I just installed this on wordpress and I have a blank box???? I swapped out the double quotes and still nothing
my code
.
its supposed to be the last widget on my side bar
http://peanutbutterandonion.wordpress.com/
Done and done! It’s looks so pretty! Thanks for the instructions!