And all the pipe cleaner animals stood erect-- a fierce wall of nylon and wire defiance--
with one voice they exclaimed, "We shall not be silenced!"

Friday, July 3, 2009

Etsy Mini Custom Code For Your Blog

I've decided to start featuring my favorite shops on my blog using Etsy minis for those shops and posting them on the right side of my blog (scroll down on the right).

The only problem is that I wanted to put a 1x1 Gallery Etsy Mini for each store, but I didn't like how Etsy did theirs. This is what theirs looks like if you take several Etsy-generated 1x1 minis and post them to your blog:


See how it looks if I post multiple shops this way? I see all that text that says "Etsy: Your place to buy & sell all things handmade, Fuzzington.etsy.com" under every listing, and it just seems seems so repetitive and takes up a lot of room on my blog. So I decided to remove it so that it looks like this:


I love how it looks a lot less cluttered! It may not make a huge difference with only two shops, but with 5 or more, it sure can!

How did I do this? I generated an Etsy mini for my store in Etsy to play with, and edited the flash code that is generated (guess my Engineeering and Computer Science degree finally paid off!). I tried to post the code at the end of this blog entry, but blogger actually uses the code and you can't see the code. I've posted the code in the Etsy forums at this thread: http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6206975

Now, here's another trick. Rather than asking people to send you their Etsy minis, you can just change any references to the user ID and name of the Etsy shop that you need an Etsy mini for. When you look at the code for your Etsy mini, look for text like that shown below, and the fields that I've highlighted in red:

object data="http://www.etsy.com/flash/spots/etsy_mini.swf?user_id=6289001&user_name=fuzzington&item_source=shop&item_size=gallery&rows=1&columns=1

So, for example, the code that I posted in this blog entry is for my store. To change it to an Etsy mini for MyDadsHands' Etsy shop, I would replace my user ID, 6289001, with hers, 7220882, and my Etsy account name "Fuzzington" to "mydadshands.' As far as I know, there are only two places in the code that looks like this, so you should be changing the user name and IDs twice each in any Etsy mini code. Make sure you type in the name of the shop exactly as it is shown in the Etsy user name, and make replacements for all id's and usernames in the code. You can use this trick with any code that you get for your Etsy Mini, regardless of the dimensions of your mini.

I think any Etsy seller would be ecstatic if y ou went ahead and made a mini-Etsy for your blog, but as usual, make sure you let them know you did as a courtesy. I'm sure they would love to know!

For those of you who would like to try this for Etsy minis larger than 1x1, the same kinds of modifications that I made to my code apply. If you need some help, feel free to convo me.

Hope this comes in handy for your blogs!!!


10 comments:

Beth Howard said...

Very cool! Might have to try this out!

Almost Precious said...

I totally agree that your neat version is soooo much more attractive to the eye.

Christie Cottage said...

This is awesome information! Thanks for sharing!

Also, thanks for posting on my Blog Blast thread!

http://christiecottage.etsy.com

shannonmari3 said...

Ahhh awesome! Thank you for posting this!

Linda B said...

This is a great post. I'm too tired to try it out so I'll have to come back.

Linda

Anonymous said...

awesome blog, ive got to try this!!!! Thanks so much for sharing!

Laughing Fridge Art Magnets said...

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I'm going to try this as soon as I have more coffee to wake the brain up!

Hapa Girls said...

I was wondering how to do that!! Thanks for sharing!!

Anonymous said...

Great idea...I am going to give this a try..thanks for sharing.

Pam of Always Artistic said...

Thank you for sharing, this is perfect!