Monday, December 13th is the much anticipated, highly regarded, horribly too soon Christmas Tour of Homes. Many thanks to BooMama for entrusting me with this huge responsibility.

Who can join in?

ANYONE. As long as you have a blog or flickr acct that you can link to–everyone is invited.

What Do I do?

Simply share some of your holiday decor by writing a post and showing photos. You can show one photo or 28–it’s totally up to you. You can write a big bunch of stuff or keep quiet, the point of the tour is to encourage and inspire each other with our decorating. I love pretty decorations but this is not a contest. Everyone is invited to join in, from the simplest decor to the most elaborate.  Please link back to thenester.com in your post so your readers can visit some other tours.

My biggest request is that you only link to ONE post.  I know many of us have lots of Christmas posts and have joined in different linky parties over the past few weeks.  Fantastic!  This is a great time to write one Mothership post with photos and links to each of your Christmas projects and posts. Link to your MOTHERSHIP post for your home tour here at Nesting Place.  That way, each person can decide what they want to find out more about while they are at your blog.

My advice?  Use your best photos in that summary/mothership post and when it comes time to pick a feature photo for the inlinkz submission, pick the most eye catching photo.  In the past I’ve looked at the stats of all the entries for linky parties and without fail the ones with the best photos get the most clicks.

How’s it work?

When you see these words on Monday at the end of the post, obey–click there to enter your PERMALINK–not today, Monday, on the Tour of Homes post.

By 8am EST Monday morning I’ll have my tour up at the top of the blog there will be an obvious place for you to enter your blog PERMALINK in at the bottom of the post. If for some reason you see an error page that means I’ve wrecked up the whole internet. Just be patient, eat a candy cane and check back soon.


What’s a permalink?

{copied straight from my sister’s explanation}

A permalink is the URL to a specific blog post. In other words, each blog post has an address and the permalink is the street number and the avenue. For example, my blog address is www.thenester.com. But the permalink to this post is https://thenester.com/2009/12/christmast-tour-how-to.html

To get the permalink, I simply clicked on the post title and it popped up in the address bar. Then copy that address and come to Nesting Place and click this button at the bottom of my post:

Once you click it you will see this:

Where it says “URL:” that’s where you paste in your permalink

It also asks for a name, I’m toying with not even having words on this linky, I think we all just like photos and the words mess up the spacing, and the email?  I have no idea why it asks that but no worries, you shouldn’t start getting spam.

Why was my link deleted?

{also copied straight from my sister’s blog }

Probably because you linked to your blog rather than the permalink of your post. Sometimes people like to browse through your Tour of Home posts from my site days or weeks after you’ve posted them. If you simply link to your blog front page, they will not be able to find your Tour post. Unless you use the permalink, your link will be deleted out of courtesy to the reader.  Or, maybe you added 13 different links to each of your Christmas posts.  In order to honor each other’s time, please link to ONE summary post and choose your BEST most inviting photo to feature.

I hope that covers everything~enjoy your holiday decorating and don’t forget to take pictures this weekend!