Pied Type: I solved my Creative Commons widget problem

Finally!! I’ve wrestled off and on for several weeks to get my Creative Commons license set up in my sidebar and today I succeeded. I had it working once before, then either I broke it or the WordPress folks did.

Along the way I’ve been able to get the image to show, but without a link; the text to show, but without the image; both elements to show, but working only in Firefox, not IE. (The WordPress guys need to optimize for both browsers.) The WordPress forums have a lot of threads on the CC problem, so at least I didn’t feel alone, once I decided to look there for help.

I’m stubborn, however. I had made that code work before. Therefore, I should be able to fix it. Untold hours of frustration later, I gave up and went to the forums. Still no ironclad fixes, just some ideas of where to start and a little insight into what was going wrong.

Be aware that WordPress will break the copy-and-paste code generated by Creative Commons, so don’t waste your time trying to get it to work.

I ended up putting the following code in a text widget to get what you see in my sidebar:

<a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/”><img src=”http://yourblogtitle.files.wordpress.com/80×151.png”></a> 
This work is licensed under a <a rel=”license” href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/”>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial- No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License</a>

I wanted everything centered; that’s why you see at the beginning and at the end. You can change that to “right” or “left” if you prefer.

“http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/” links to the details of the specific license I chose at CC. Yours may be different.

“http://yourblogtitle.files.wordpress.com/80×151.png” is the link to the CC logo, which I copied and uploaded to this blog’s graphics files. You’ll need to do the same for whichever CC logo you want to use, then use the appropriate link in your widget code. Hot-linking to a logo on the CC site doesn’t seem to work.

I inserted line breaks — — where I wanted them to fall. You can leave them as they are, put them where you want them, or remove them completely. The rest of the code is the text for the specific license I selected, linked to the CC page that explains it in detail.

I’m not particularly nimble with coding, and I may not have explained this very well. But it worked for me and maybe it will help you.

(Note: This worked at the time of the post. I’ve redone the blog several times since then, so the sidebar may look different now.)