Church/community edition

(Editor’s note: The Seek And Find FIVE is predicated on the idea that with just five minutes of work out of your busy schedule, you can make your Seek And Find listing work for you around the clock. This month’s edition stretches that definition a bit: we’ll say that, for whoever your parish or organization's webmaster or tech guru is, this is a five-minute tutorial; for everyone else, we’ll include the standard disclaimer—don’t try this at home, folks!)

A widget is a gadget used to convey information from another source without leaving the host Web site. Widgets are small pieces of Web code that can be embedded into a Web site and are used to display information on Web pages. They can be applied to any Web page and are commonly used on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and blogs.

Currently, there are two types of Seek And Find widgets:

• Bulletin widget—Allows you to display current and past issues of your publication directly on your parish or community’s Web site (in addition to your Seek And Find listing). No need to upload your publications anymore. They are automatically displayed as they become available.

• Sponsor widget—Displays a categorized or alphabetical listing of the sponsors of your publications on your Web site.

Information on the Seek And Find widgets is updated nightly. For the bulletin widget, this means your latest publication is usually available on the widget on your Web site within one business day of you submitting your publication to Liturgical Publications for printing.

Both widgets are available free to all current LPi publishing customers. The code is available on the Edit Your Details page after your first publication has been uploaded to Seek And Find. Simply click on the widget and a screen with the code will pop up; from there it’s a matter of copying and pasting.

The default setting for the number of publications to display on the bulletin widget is twelve, although you can customize this within the widget code to show a smaller number if you wish. This widget code is placed in the [body] section of your Web site. We recommend that if you do not have Web coding experience, that you contact someone within your organization who does. Besides the number of publications that display in the widget, several other features can be customized as well:

1. rss_widget_max_links=[number of publications to display]
2. rss_widget_width=[width of the widget in pixels]
3. rss_widget_height=[height of the widget in pixels]
4. rss_widget_border=[border color in hex format, '#CCCCCC']
5. rss_widget_font=[font to be used for the header and link text]
6. rss_widget_show_thumbs=[include thumbnail view of the publication, ‘yes’ or ‘no’]
7. rss_widget_header=[text title of the widget you wish to display]

Here’s an example of how the bulletin widget will appear on your site:

And here’s an example of the sponsor widget:

So do your members, your sponsors, and yourself a favor, and forward this e-newsletter on to your webmaster; the bulletin widget saves you the trouble of uploading the bulletin each week, and the sponsor widget is a great way to say thank you to the advertisers who support your publication!

As always, if you need to reference previous editions of the Seek And Find FIVE, visit our blog.