Having used Blogger for about six years now, I have become quite used to the old Blogger interface. It has only been in recent days that I have been using the new interface and I am really starting to like it. Not only can you easily look up total view counts on your posts, you can now connect your Blogger account with your Google+ account.



When doing so, you will replace your Blogger profile with your public Google+ profile. This will allow you to:

Tonight I came across a new blog for bloggers who seek the best of the blogosphere. Each week, one blog will be featured on The Blogger's Concierge and I'd like to be a part of this Red Carpet Event. So here I am, writing about why I'm an A-lister.


Aside from the obvious fact that I'm a teacher, I was also an A-student growing up. C'mon, that's gotta count for something, right? But seriously, I think Toronto Teacher Mom offers a unique perspective on parenting with two children under 5 and 200+ students who call me Madame. I also like to add as much Canadian content as possible and love doing reviews on eco-friendly, organic and natural products since I particularly enjoy being the first to try new things. If you have a blog you'd like to share, I personally invite you to join in and have a glass of bubbly to welcome The Blogger's Concierge. Cheers!

Just a few days ago, I was overwhelmed with a sudden desire to design my own Grab Button and figure out how to add the special code to my Blogger template. So I googled and browsed, and settled on the instructions I found on the blog of a fellow mom blogger - All About Kimberly. She explains the steps in detail on how to add the "Grab My Button" link for WordPress users. I figured it would be the same if not similar using Blogger. So I followed her steps and entered the code into a text box widget (I didn't think of ever putting HTML code into a text box before. I have always used the HTML/Javascript widget in Blogger.) The only glitch I noticed was that, by copying and pasting directly from her post into the text box, the quotation marks mysteriously appeared twice, one set slanted and the other vertical. I didn't think to read all the way to the end of her post that suggested you copy and paste the code into Notepad first and then copy and paste from there into the widget. I just manually edited my quotation marks and it worked. Thanks, Kimberly!

Now here is my latest discovery that I'm so excited to share with you! I really wanted a button that matched my blog template, which is a wonderful freebie designed by the talented April at April Showers Blog Design. [Here's the thing... I'm not sure how copyright works and I suppose I could google that info, too. But I will state that the template is not my own and therefore I cannot take full credit for the design of my button. And if someone can clarify this for me, please don't hesitate to do so because I don't want to infringe on any copyright laws here. I should probably pre-order The Blogger's Guide to the Galaxy: Everything You Wanted to Know About Blogging (But Were Afraid To Ask)]

Update: I emailed April about using a snapshot of this template and she said it was fine as long as I keep her link on my blog.

This is what I did:

1. I loaded my site in a web browser (I usually use Firefox) and on my Mac, I took a screen shot. You can do this by simultaneously pressing the Apple Key, Shift and 4. You will then be able to select an area anywhere on the screen and, as soon as you release the mouse button, it takes a snapshot and saves it onto your desktop with the time stamp. I chose to grab a shot of the flowers in the header. In Windows, you'd use the Print Screen or Prt Scr key but you'll probably need to crop the image to narrow in on what you'd like to use for the button background.

2. Upload the snapshot to an online photo service such as Photobucket. I use Flikr but I'm quickly running out of storage space.

3. Next, you need to resize the image to 125 x 125, . In Flickr, you would click on Edit Photo. This launches the editing tool called Picnik. Now click on Resize to enter the dimensions.

4. Finally, edit your image by adding a border and any text you'd like. Continuing from step 3, you would simply click on the Create tab to take advantage of all these and other neat options available in Picnik.

5. Once you have saved the image, you'll need to grab the photo's url to be used in your "Grab My Button" code. In Flickr, you'll need to click on All Sizes.

This is how mine turned out after creating my button image and following Kimberly steps:







I love how it turned out! What do you think?