The Quick and Easy Way to Display Mundane Charts on Your Blog

Although the addition of images to your blog posts significantly increases a reader’s sense of engagement, it requires more work on behalf of the blogger. This is especially the case when it comes to chart wheels. Let’s say you want to show a chart for the Aries Ingress on March 20. Typically, you would have to do the following:

1. Either open your astrology software or visit a site like astro.com
2. Enter date, time and location
3. Save the chart as a jpg, gif or png (basically, a file that you can display in a web broswer)
4. Upload the image file to a web server
5. Link to it from within your blog post

This process is time-intensive, but fortunately there’s a shortcut. Kirk Kahn of Planet Watcher has programmed his site so that all you have to do is plop some code into your blog post and just change a few variables:

<img src=”http://planetwatcher.com/chartwheel.php?size=400&asc=0&date=Mar 20 2010 1:32 pm EST”>



As you can observe above, I displayed the chart for the Aries Ingress by entering the date of the ingress after “date=”. I specified a width and height of 400 pixels for the chart image by putting “400″ after “size=”.

If I want to “turn” the chart, I change the value after “asc=”. So, if I want Libra rising, “asc=180″.

<img src=”http://planetwatcher.com/chartwheel.php?size=400&asc=180&date=Mar 20 2010 1:32 pm EST”>



If you just want a noon chart at Universal Time, use UTC instead of EST:

<img src=”http://planetwatcher.com/chartwheel.php?size=400&asc=0&date=Mar 20 2010 12:00 pm UTC”>



There is a full list of date formats that you can use if you want to play around. And it appears that you are limited to using the equal houses system. However, if all you want to do is display the chart for an ingress or exact aspect and don’t care about location, then just plopping this code into your blog post will save you a few minutes.

Slide Into the Future: Add Slides to Your Astrology Site

by Jamie Funk

Adding pictures apart from horoscopes to your blog is good for many reasons. It pretties up the page and breaks up the text, making your blog more readable. It also brings in more visitors because of Google images. As an example, if you upload an image of Virgo, name it as such and when people click on that pic at Google images it will link to your site. There may be many images exactly the same listed with different links, but it does add to your hit count.

A great widget to add to your blog is slide. You upload your pics and there are heaps of options avaibale to make it integrate well with your theme. Once you have the code, you can play around with it to alter the height and width to make it fit snugly in the sidebar. Marina illustrates her blog articles and we use the slide widget to display them on the sidebar of our blog. Colour and movement animates the page making it more attractive to visitors.

Beth’s Note: You can insert a slide into a post rather than a widget space by playing around with the html. Copy and past the slide code into your post. Add this piece of code–align=”whatever alignment you want” into the body of the slide code after the html code “width=”numbers for width”.
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About the Author


Jamie Funk hangs his blogging hat at “Funkastrology–Cutting Edge Astrology for Uranian Times which he shares with his fiance Marina. Funkastrology has been listed in The Mountain Astrologer as a hot blog to watch. Of course it is!