Craig Shillington

Okay … we have discussed how to set up Sets in your Profile, if you are not up to speed with doing that yet, I’d advise understanding and get that working first before attempting this next step. You can view that [HOW TO] HERE

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At the moment my Profile looks like THIS As you can see I have used the same type of button to try to keep my profile looking neat and tidy. First thing you will want to do is decide on what STYLE you want your profile to be, as the button choice will make all the difference. I liked mine because it sorta had a Red Button feel to it. You can either make your buttons online, the site I used was Button Generator , or you might want to have a go at making your own buttons (my buttons are about 135×25 pixels). Which ever you decide to do you will need somewhere online to upload your button to, that way when people view your profile the links to the buttons will work. I used my ISP’s storage space to store my buttons, you can also use free online storage spaces such as Image Shack to store them. Once you have this sorted out and the images uploaded, you are right to move onto the step of placing the images in your profile and linking those buttons to your Sets.

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We already know that we can link to text by placing quotes around the text and adding a colon and the link afterwards. That’s how we made the Sets and the links to them before. So we understand that putting a link directly after a colon links whatever is before that colon to that URL. Such as:

” link text ” : http://www.thelink.com

The ” linktext ” part shows the text {linktext} as a link … and it links to the URL www.thelink.com because of the use of the colon. Of course when we put these links in our profiles, there are no spaces in the line at all … that way the whole thing works.

When you understand how this works, you will see now that we can actually change the TEXT part for an image. In this case, instead of showing the sets as text links, we can change that for an image of a button.

In Red Bubble, if you want to show ANY image all you need to do is know the link to the image and wrap that link in Exclamation marks. Easy eh. So to show a text link, you wrap the text in quotes … to show an image you wrap the image link in !’s.

The MESSAGE ME button in my profile is stored at my ISP. The link is:

http://home.people.net.au/ ~ casphotography/m.gif

You can copy and paste that to the address bar in your browser (remove the spaces around the Tilde { ~ }) and press enter, it will open up the Message Me button in your browser window. What you then need to figure out is what the links to YOUR buttons are going to be. You can test if you have your links right by copying the links (like mine there) into your Browser Address bar and pressing enter. If the only thing you see in your browser window is your button (and it usually ends in jpg, gif or png) then THAT is the link to THAT button. All is working well :) :)

To make the button visible in Red Button, all you need to do is wrap the LINK in !’s without any spaces at all so for my Message Me button it would look like this (again, without spaces):

! http://home.people.net.au/ ~ casphotography/m.gif !

You can play with that by editing your profile and going right to the bottom and putting the code in … then viewing the public version of your profile to make sure it works. Once you are happy with that, you can then move onto linking your sets to the buttons. :)

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Once again we know to link to stuff all we need to do is type a colon and the link we want to link to. :) As we have all already worked out how to do the TEXT versions of sets in our profiles, we are half way there already :) All we need to do now is replace the TEXT links we have with the BUTTON links. So really it is just a matter of removing the text parts and replacing those with the button codes.

I will use my Trees Set as an example. As a text link it would look like this in my profile {again, no spaces}

” Trees ” : http://www.redbubble.com/people/crackers1967/art/everything/tags/tree

If you have set the Text links up to your Sets in your Profiles you will already have lines like this there. What we want to do now is replace the TEXT link for Trees, with the button. So all we do is replace the ” Trees ” bit with the button photo. In my Profile it looks like this:

! http://home.people.net.au/~casphotography/RB/Profile/treesbutton.gif ! : http://www.redbubble.com/people/crackers1967/art/everything/tags/tree

That is probably not showing as one whole single line, but when you put it in your profile it is … one single line of text without spaces. Then it will look like this:

So, go edit that line you put in to show your button at the bottom of your profile before. Have the Button link wrapped in !’s … then a colon {:} then the link to your set. Save and preview your Public profile and click the button and make sure it works. If it does you can now add more buttons and links. :)

If you want more than one button on a line (I have 2 per line) just do each button code with a space between them. so you will have code for 2 or 3 buttons all on one line with a space between the 1^st and 2^nd and a space between the 2^nd and 3^rd button codes. It will look strange in your Profile when you are editing it because the long lines will wrap back to the start, so it will look like they are broken, but as long as you have spaces where you are meant to, and no spaces where there aren’t meant to be, all should work. Again, practice at the bottom of your profile and keep checking it till it works, then when you have it working, move the text up in the About Me box till you have it placed where you want it.

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I have found that placing a line of space between each line helps too.

Good Luck :) :)

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Just a warning on using MS Word or other programs for editing text. These programs have a funny way of formatting text and as such using them will make all the code not work. IF you are going to use such a program to edit text I would suggest using MS Notepad ….. or simply type out the code in RB and copy and paste and edit within your About Me Box

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View all my HOW TO’S