As you read through various blogs, you’ll probably start to notice that many of them participate in weekly blog carnivals or ‘memes’, such as ‘Wordless Wednesday’, ‘Thursday Thirteen’ or ‘Saturday Photo Hunt’ to name a just a few of the more popular ones. And many of the sites that publish posts for these weekly memes have a spot at the bottom of the post where other participants can leave their name and a link to their post as well.

So, how do I add one of these ‘link lists’ to a post?

The Auto-Linkies are generated courtesy of a site called ‘Mister Linky’s Magical Widgets’. In order to use them on your own blog, you’ll need to create an account there and go through the steps to add the Auto-Linky code to your blog and your posts on which you want a Linky to appear. There are pretty comprehensive instructions on the Mister Linky site, but I’ll run through the basics here as well, to get you started.

Setting up an account with Mister Linky

There are a few different options – one of which is free, and several which are not. The free (or basic) registration allows you to add one linky at a time to your blog. Previous Linky lists can still be viewed, but readers can only add  their links to the most current Auto-Linky that you have used.

For a reasonable cost, you can upgrade your account to either a Silver, Gold or Platinum membership – these give you additional features, based on which membership option you choose. For more details about each of the available membership options (including the cost for each), visit the Mister Linky Upgrade page.

Choosing your blog platform and setting up header code

Now that you’re all registered, you can start the process of setting up your blog to be able to use the Auto-Linky widgets. Don’t worry – it’s a one-time step, and not too difficult. The specific instructions you’ll need to follow will depend on which blogging platform you use.

Note: Most of the Auto-Linky code uses JavaScript, so your blogging platform needs to support JavaScript in order to be able to use all Linky options. Of the more commonly used blog platforms, WordPress.com is the only one that does not support JavaScript, and therefore if your blog is hosted on WordPress.com, you can only use the Image-Linky option. This limitation does not apply to self-hosted (WordPress.org) blogs. And if your blog is self-hosted on WordPress, check out the new plug-in option!

For this example, we’ll assume that the platform of choice is Blogger (the ‘new’ or current version) since many ‘newbie’ bloggers use this platform and may be unfamiliar with how to set up the Auto-Linkies to work on their blogs.

Step1: Login to the Mister Linky site.  Then choose ‘Wizard’ from the top menu bar.

Step 2: Choose your blogging platform (in this case, “Blogger (new or ‘upgraded’)”, and then choose the type of Linky widget that you want to use. You can see a preview of each type on the site. For this example, we’ll use the Original Auto-Linkies.

Step 3: Choose which meme you are participating in that other bloggers will link to. Most of the common ones are listed in the dropdown or you can leave it blank if you are generating a Linky for some other reason.

Step 4: The next page gives specific instructions as to how to add the code to both your template (one-time only) and your post in order to generate the Linky. Once you have installed the header script as per the instructions, then you can ignore that portion of the page from here on out and just copy and paste the actual auto-link script into your blog post.

Once you’ve copied and pasted the auto-link script into your post, you should be all set!

Note: You can go back and view lists of all the links in each of your Mister Linky widgets by clicking on ‘Widgets’ from the top menu bar.

If you run into any problems, you can always click on ‘Support’ from the top menu bar and enter a support ticket describing your issue.  And here are links to a few posts which may be of help as well:

Blogging Basics 101 – How Do I Use Mr. Linky?

5 Minutes For Mom – About Blogging: Carnivals, Memes and Mr. Linky

Mister Linky’s Blog – Adding the header code to your (new) Blogger template

This post has been submitted to the Group Writing Project over at An Island Life, on the topic of "How To…".