Missing Something?

1st March will be for many bloggers remembered as a dark day in blogging history. Imagine suddenly losing the company of half of your visitors. This is what happened to many of my blogging friends, using the Wordpress platform to blog, express themselves and communicate with you. A week today, Google removed 'GFC Connect' for blogs not hosted by Google/Blogger. I have yet to understand why Google decided to do that but the direct impact is that all the Wordpress blogs that you love and follow, and which you've been following through GFC Connect, the very popular susbcription service, have not been working well.





If you have been using Google Dashboard for example to keep up to date with your blogs subscriptions and read your blogs, chances are the wordpress blogs you've been following are no longer appearing on your dashboard and that they have been gone totally. If their name is still on the Google Dashboard, you might not be receiving notifications of their latest posts. I am not very good at explaining technical things but let me try. you can compare GFC Connect as Royal Mail in England. Imagine that you've been relying on Royal Mail to have your post delivered every day (when there is post) to your door and that suddenly they are on strike and you can't get your mail. This is what has been happening for a week, only that the strike is permanent.


My blog is hosted on Blogger. I am fortunate, I can let a sigh of relief out, wash my hands and forget that this has been happening. After all, I am not concerned. But I cannot help but feeling deeply concerned for my blogging friends, who are blogging on Wordpress. My friend Charlotte, from lipglossiping.com, has been a victim of the disappearance of GFC Connect Widget and this is what she noticed shortly after GFC disappeared:





How do you get to know easily if you are still receiving all the updates of your blogs, as you should do? Of all the blogs you follow, which ones are Blogger Blogs, which ones are Wordpress Blogs, you may ask. This is the tricky part, but please keep on reading:


I keep in touch with all my blogs subscriptions with Google Reader (I will do a separate post on this, on why I love it so much) and Google Reader tells me that I follow 427 blogs. Google Reader doesn't tell me which ones uses Wordpress or Bloggers so I've painstakingly gone through each of my subscriptions and found out that 26 of my subscriptions (is that 6%?) are hosted on Wordpress and that I might be missing their updates.


Am I suggesting you to go through this long process? No. But Lipglossiping and I have done some of the leg work for you, and with the power of twitter, we've managed to start creating a list, listing some of you who have been affected by the disappearance of GFC Connect: http://bit.ly/gfcexiled.


The list is obviously not exhaustive and we do not pretend to know of everyone who has been affected by the loss of GFC. But it's a small step towards building that link between those unfortunate bloggers and their readers, link which Google broke for ever, one week ago when they got rid of the infamous GFC Connect button.


Somewhere in the world, a Wordpress blogger is asking themselves what they are doing wrong, and if their blog posts are rubbish as their readership/traffic has dramatically gone for about a week. Can you help? Here are 5 ways you can help:



1) Spread the message that the GFC Connect service has gone from non-blogger posts

2) Tweet about #goodbyeGFC. For your convenience, you can download the ready-made 'goodbye GFC awareness' picture that Lipglossing created. You can obviously choose your own words for tweeting about this but if you're stuck trying to fit it all in 140 characters, fell free to use the suggestions below:

Your readers might not you've been affected by #goodbyeGFC. Please help spread the message. http://bit.ly/gfcplea

The removal of GFC for many bloggers has had tragic consequences. Please help us spread the word: http://bit.ly/gfcplea #goodbyeGFC thank you

#goodbyeGFC #hellosupport Let's help our blogging friends reconnect with their lost readers. http://bit.ly/gfcplea.

The 'gfcplea' address is a shortened address linking to the post Lipglossiping wrote to start the awareness movement but feel free to naturally substitute it by another address you might feel is appropriate, or a link to your own post, if you have written something about it.

3) Post the 'goodbye GFC awareness' picture on your tumblr / pinterest account

4) Promote alternative ways to follow blogs other than Google Dashboard (bloglovin, facebook, hellocotton, email subscriptions, google reader etc.. {I will devote a post to this when I have more time}

5) Check the 'Bloggers in Exile' list to see if one of the blogs you read are in there, and renew your subscription to them. (For me, this means, adding manually again, some blog addresses in my google reader, but I'll go through all that in a separate post, and why you need google reader in your life)

Essential Reading:
- Missing updates in Dashboard? – It's due to Google Friend Connect! http://t.co/Kg2Q9Gc
A post by @michelledh
- The post where everything started. A plea by Lipglossiping.com: http://www.bit.ly/gfcplea
- Where to download easy tweetable pictures about the disappearance of GFC connect: http://www.bit.ly/gfcplea
- List of some bloggers affected the GFC removal, and their contact details: http://bit.ly/gfcexiled


Thank you so much for your help.

p.s what is the most important here is that the message passes accross. If you want to take part in the awareness movement, by all means you can liberally copy and paste as much as you want from this post. Not that it's very well written, but there you go, haha.

liloo xx