The Beta News

Inspired by Wendy Piersall’s post “What’s on Your To Do List? Let Pool our Resources” I’ve spent the most of the morning figuring out how to create one.

I’ve decided to create two tutorials – One for the technical-minded and one for the lazy man/woman.

Let’s start with the one for the lazy man/woman:

• First create a favicon. You can create one yourself, use your existing or create one online using this tool
• I found this online tool, it will create the Google Toolbar Button for you
• Add the link to your blog or site. Click to add The Official The Beta News Google Toolbar Button

And now for something completely different – The technical guide:

There’s not really even any coding involved, just a simple XML file and a link! (Hopefully this didn’t disappoint any technical minded)

You will need to compose an XML document. Google will use this to create the button. It’s nothing fancy – really!

To start out we can use my existing XML file: (you can also download it Use Right-Click and Save as)

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<custombuttons xmlns=”http://toolbar.google.com/custombuttons/”>
<button>
<title>Petersen Inc.</title>
<description>The Official Petersen Inc. Google Toolbar Button</description>
<site>http://www.thebetanews.com</site>
<search>http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.thebetanews.com+{query}</search>
<feed refresh-interval=”3600″>http://www.thebetanews.com/feed</feed>
<icon mode=”base64″ type=”image/x-icon”>AAABAAIAEBAAAAAAAABoBQAAJgAAACAgAAAAAAAAqAgAAI4FAAAoAAAAEAAAACAAAAABAAgAAAAA
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/QDr6ugAxq2HAPn5+wDj0LQA/fz6APv49ADex6UA+/v7APf4+QD+/v4A/P3+AP7//wD///4A/Pz9
ANS3igAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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gAAAAIAAAACAAAAAgAAAAIAAAACAAAAAgAAAAIAAAACAAAAAgAAAAIAAAACAAAAAgAAAAIAAAACA
AAAAgAAAAIAAAACAAAAAgAAAAIAAAACAAAAAgAAAAIAAAACAAAAAgAAAAP////8=</icon>
<update>http://www.thebetanews.com/betanews.xml</update>
</button>
</custombuttons>
Most of this is the base64 encoded icon – we’ll get to that in a minute. What you need to do is copy the above XML then begin replacing the values inside the elements. The elements are:

• site – The location the browser will be directed to if someone clicks your button
• title – The name of your button
• description – Keep it short, this will appear when your mouse hovers over the button on the toolbar
• update – the location of the XML file
• icon – base64 encoded representation of your button’s icon
• feed – an RSS or Atom feed added to your button (required if you want to submit your button to the Google Button Gallery) You can add more than one too!

You don’t need all of them. The main ones are in red above. Just replace the values between these tags in the XML with your own. To base64 encode an image for your button, determine or create your image. (I used Green Marines favicon.ico since it will be made 16 x 16 pixels anyway). Then use this page to encode your image. Copy the result into the image element of your XML document.

If you have an RSS or Atom feed, insert the URL of your feed into the feed element. Save your document with an .xml extension (we used updated_button.xml). Copy the XML file to the root of your website directory. It’s ready to go!

Now, just add the below link to your site, where ever you choose and when people click it, they will get your button added onto their Google toolbar:

http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=http://www.<my domain>.com/filename.xml

Replace the url= with the fully qualified public url to your xml file. For instance: http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=http://www.thebetanews.com/petersen-inc.xml

If someone clicks the link and doesn’t already have the correct version of Google Toolbar installed, they will be prompted to install the correct toolbar.

That’s it! For more detailed instructions go here: http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/buttons/apis/howto_guide.html

And remember to add my Google Toolbar Button