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

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Help! My Google Friend Connect box has gone. How to create an alternative GFC button

Blogger has been a right pain in the bum working not very well lately. As if Blogger being down on Thursday 12 and Friday 13 May  was not bad enough, users have been experiencing trouble with leaving comments on blogs and even responding to  the comments left by others on their blog. Blogger is aware of it and they're trying to fix it. I hope they're sweating hard to fix it, as the temptation to move to wordpress is getting bigger.

There is another  glitch happening at the moment which Blogger has yet to acknowledge and I am left to wonder whether it's meant to  be like that from now on: The Google Friend Connect box seems to have disappeared. Whether this is going to be a  permanent feature, I don't know but what I do know is that lots of you are quite upset about it.


Personally I couldn't  wait to get rid of my Google Friend Connect box: I just hated being judged on the number of Google Friend Connect  followers I had. I know that people can still find out how many followers I have but it is not as  straightforward as before and I feel happier about it.


My lovely friend Bicky has written a lovely post about why she hates is not a fan of that contentious GFC box and thanks to her  video and help on twitter I was able to do an alternative GFC button and still allow new visitors to follow me  through Google Friend Connect.


Do you need that Google Friend Connect box anyway? People can still follow you through Google Friend Connect  thanks to the navbar at the top, right?


That box is not compulsory for people to be able to follow you. And yes, people can start following your blog using the navbar but not everyone is  aware of that bar and what it can do for you. At the end of the day, you need to give people what they want.  Getting more readers / followers is hard work and you don't want to put them off because their preferred option of following your blog is not showing. If your readers want to have a button to click on and that is all it takes  for them to follow your blog, GIVE THEM A BUTTON. Make it easy for them. Also, some Blogger users may have had  their navbar removed for aesthetic purposes, so you can't always rely on that navbar to be there. Sometimes,  even when the navbar is on, the 'follow' link is not even there!!! {I am looking at you Internet Explorer}

So how do you get/install/create an alternative Google Friend Connect button?


It's not too much hard work actually and follows a very simple concept:

1. Grabbing from the navbar the short line of code which, when clicked on, enables your visitors to follow your blog
2. Creating a picture which could say for example 'click here to follow me on Google Friend Connect’
3. Creating a widget/gadget where you are going to insert that picture with the 'follow' link. No need to tinker too much with your main template and have great knowledge of html. woop.

Need more help? Read on. The following explains in baby language the 3 steps you need to follow and it is not meant to be patronising.
I'm going to assume you have not removed your navbar. If you have purposefully removed it, I am going to assume  that you know what you're doing and that you will remember how to get it back. 

	Grabbing the 'follow' code from your navbar Sometimes Blogger (on internet explorer) goes off on one and won't display the 'follow' link. You'll have to refresh the page, or log in again, or open your blog with a different browser until you see your navbar display the 'follow' link properly as shown below: -- Click on FOLLOW. This will in turn display a line of code in the address bar of your browser (at this stage you don't have to follow your blog  if you don't want to) we're only doing this to see the line of code. -- Select that line of code, copy and paste it in a word document or text document (right click on the link to copy the code)
	Creating or choosing a picture for your alternative Google Friend Connect button If you have no skills whatsoever in Photoshop or similar programme, by all means feel free to pinch one of the pictures below, or all of them if you want. Although they are not the nicest pictures.  Bicky has done her DIY button to match her template and is just so pretty. transparent on white background:       transparent on dark background:        You don't have to have that Google logo in there, but the Google logo will make people feel at home  and immediately recognise it. If you are going to create a picture, and if you want to put this picture in your  sidebar, please make sure that the width of the picture is not bigger than the width of your actual sidebar. If  it is blogger will shrink it like a bastard find a way to shrink it no matter what and it will look horrible and you won’t be able to sleep at night.
	Add the widget/gadget -- Click on design, then page elements, then ADD A GADGET and choose to add the PICTURE gadget. The rest is pretty self explanatory: -- Where it says 'link' paste that line of code you retrieved before and pasted into a temporary document -- Upload your picture (if you choose to use one of my pictures, please be considerate to my bandwidth. Download the  picture first, save it on your drive and upload it on your server, thank you) -- No need to add a title, but if you must, you can type 'follow my blog' with Google Friend Connect or something  like that. Click on SAVE and voila.

Please note this ‘new’ DIY button won't display the number of GFC followers you have. This will be perfect for smaller bloggers who are a bit embarrassed about the number of followers they have. Bloggers with a bigger readership might get upset that they can’t show off their numbers.
If you like this 'tutorial' feel free to share it to your friends, family and pets.


Personally and on a selfish note, I am really happy that the box is gone (I have yet to ascertain whether it’s coming back) and I can’t help myself from being influenced by the number it shows. A low number will make think ‘aww, that little blogger and its 14 followers, bless her little cotton socks’. A high number will make me think ‘how did she got all of those, I am so crap in comparison wow this blogger is doing really well. And if I think like that, it’s only understandable that *some* beauty companies regrettably and frustratringly might think the same too and approach you or not accordingly.


Do you know what would be funny in an ironic way? That the wretched Google Friend Connect box reappears the minute I publish this post.

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