House Rules Book releases April 23

Practice Linky Page

Need a little practice adding your link up to a linky party?  Here’s a place to link away in the privacy of a hidden page where you can wreck it all up and make a fool of yourself without anyone knowing.  You should see a little “x” under your link after you link up–that only YOU will see, that’s there if you want to delete your link and start over.  Keep in mind, if you delete your link on the day of the real party, you will lose your space and be placed at the current end of the party.  Sometimes the first 10 or 20 spaces can fill up in a matter of minutes so you want to make sure  you know what you are doing.

Also, for parties like You Made a Wreath Out of WHAT {click that link if you want to see a past linky party}, you will want to link up to a PERMALINK which is the link to the exact post address, not just your blog. So for me, that means when it asks for my permalink I put in ::

THIS

You Made a Wreath Out of What?! A Linky Party

NOT

https://thenester.com/

You can get your permalink a few ways,  one way is if it’s a published post, just click on the title of your post and your blog should bring up that post as your front page…see right under this how I’ve highlighted the http address bar in blue?  That’s the permalink I copied {the address of the exact post} and that’s what I would put into the permalink section of the wreath party.  If you need to find another way to get your permalink feel free to consult google.

If you are joining in a party like the wreath linky part or the tour of homes, or 31 Days, not putting your permalink in will get you deleted...and you can feel free to link up again correctly.  The reason the permalink is important is that if you just put in https://thenester.com/ for your link, then yes, that day it will link over and your top post will be your wreath or whatever post you want to show off but as soon as you write another post, the post you were trying to link up to will be buried.  Many people look at links from the party weeks or even months or years after the original linky party day, you want them to be directed to the post they are looking for, not just the front page of your blog.

So for 31 days, if you are linking up you will want to either link to the permalink for day one OR you may want to consider linking to an introductory post.   Maybe this is a post where every day you will add the most recent post in your series so on the 20th of October, you will have 20 posts listed and hyperlinked to this page.  Or maybe you just link to your first post in the series.  No matter how you do it, make it easy on the reader to find the next post, even if they are joining in reading a day or a week or a year later.

There’s a practice link-up at the bottom of this post, feel free to link up, delete your link and play around with it.  All you need to do to link up is click on that blue oblong button with the frog that says “add your link”.  This is just for practice so you can link up any crazy post as long as it’s not porn or an ad or something, just find your latest post and practice.  I went ahead and linked up to my 31 day series from 2011 just for fun.

If you are going to link up for 31 days you can link to your button or just to a photo, but you want SOMETHING in the image or else it will show a weird cartoon frog. I don’t want to see any cartoon frogs. Think about the image that you choose to have displayed, I can see on the back-end which links get clicked the most and it’s always the links with the most eye-catching photos, or maybe you want to use your 31 days button if you are linking up to 31 days.  It’s up to you and for the record, inappropriate images will also be deleted.  So no images of white shoes after labor day.

All images in the linky will be square shaped, if you click on the “crop”option you can control where the image is cropped. In the post I linked to here in the practice area for number 1. I didn’t have a square button in my post and it automatically grabs images that are already installed in your post and lets you choose one to feature.  So I just cropped my rectangular button.  You will most likely want to create a square button (see my entry #2) so it will look nice on the link up on October 1st.  I like to make lots of shapes of buttons because I am odd and like to have different graphics throughout the series.  One graphic for a whole month for my own series bores me.  But there are no rules.  You don’t even have to have a button or graphic. You don’t have to have the number 31 on your graphic.  You can just link up to a photo if you want (check out last years linky to see what catches your eye).

Still don’t understand?  Click around.  Check out last year’s October 1st link up and see how people used their image and linked up to their first post (usually, no rules do it however you think will help your reader).  You can link to your first post, you can link to a page where you will list all of the current posts that is updated daily. So if someone clicks it on October 15 there will be a list with the first 15 posts with links to them, you can link up to a category you created just for this topic and then it will always have the latest post at the top.