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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Poll: Why is YOUR blog post not getting ‘enough’ comments?

People can say what they want: that they blog primarily for the passion of blogging, sharing but ultimately, the more positive comments you receive on your posts,  the happier you are. And you can't help but  feeling a little bit sad or discouraged when some of your cherished posts gets very few comments or in some cases zero comments at all.






2 of my beauty bloggers friends were noticing  yesterday how the number of comments left on their blog posts had decreased, whilst the number of  visits had stayed the same. Why is that? What are they doing differently? What has changed? One thing led to another, this set my twitter timeline on fire and I found myself in the  middle of a very passionate debate:

When bloggers experienced a decrease in comments  is it because  they've lost 'their touch' and not engaging their audience as they have in the past or could there  other factors explaining the decrease of comments left

As a blog reader, do you personally feel you comment enough on the blog you read?
If not, what is preventing you from
commenting more?

And this is what you had to say on the topic:

Interesting, no?

So we have readers who don't feel their comment would bring valuable contribution to the debate,  others put off by the dreaded 'captchas' and technicalities associated with posting comments, on top of everyone who feel that they are simply not enough hours in the day to comment as much as they would  like to. The general consensus is that most of you feel they don't comment and wish they left more  more comments on blog posts.


Where do I belong? In every category really.  Since I have been reading blogs through Google reader, I find  myself managing to read blogs very fast: Google reader makes it very easy for me to read, as its  name suggests but it's definitely not intended to leave comments, which is my problem starts. I tend  to 'star' the blogs which I prefer and would definitely comment on 'later' but am put off to click  on the actual blog, and start the technical nightmare of commenting:

Like captchas was not bad enough (most of the blogs I follow - mine included - are on blogger) I  find myself to press the 'send' button many times, cos the first time I pressed it it didn't send  and having to wait everytime I pressed send for the confirmation from my blogger that message has  successfully, confirmation which needs me to scroll up and down the page like a loonie. Even  sometimes when I comment on my blog, I am having to log on again, press send, check to see if has  been sent, a red button appear, I press send again, a second red button appear, then some weird  stuff appears, asking me to preview (I don't want to preview the f*ckin thing god dammit, just send  the wretched thing already, will you blogger, and then after the 4th time I pressed SEND I see that it had  been sent ok. Needless to say that from now on, I always make sure to copy my comment before running  the risk of losing in the process. Like everyone, I wish I had more time, but commenting was easier,  then I would think I would spend more time commenting and make the most of it.

 


Time is definitely an issue and I feel some people (well I do anyway) after commenting on a certain  amount of posts (let's say 10) get tired. So whilst they found your post a very interesting  read, it might have come up at the wrong timing in their reading sequence: they are either reading  from their phone (can you actually comment from a phone) or have already commented on other posts. So your  post, however great it is, suffers that day from not being part of this selected few. This is  my theory anyway. Whilst your content is amazing and comment worthy, people follow more and more  blogs so your blog finds yourself in a big competition of hundreds of others popping up in your email / RSS  reader / dashboard …


Also your devoted readers, inspired by their readings feel like they can bring more to the 'beauty  pot' with starting their own blog as a result and find themselves to have less time to comment.  Whilst I am writing all this non sense and it's 1.45am, I could have been commenting on all the  blogs I've starred/favorited today, and promised myself to comment on. Sadly, I know I won't have reached my  target and would have probably tweeted about your post rather than commenting on it directly.


And then you have this mismatch, as observed by jadlgw above, about the amount of comments she  leaves (because she wants to and enjoys it) versus the amount of comments she gets on her blog  posts. Is it fair to expect a 'satisfying' amount of comment, when you, yourself don't leave many  comments? But then again, are you going to expect the girl behind Temptalia to go and comment on  your blog? When would she find the time? You'd rather she kept the beauty world up to date, as it  happens with the latest Mac collections rather than commenting on lots of blogs, right?


How many comments should we be expecting per blog post anyway? Whatever this desirable or expected  number might be, we need to find ways to cheer ourselves up. If you are a blogger, and reading this  and haven't already done so, I would strongly strongly urge you to subscribe some website which  helps you tracking the amount of traffic your blog is generating. I only opened a free account to  Google analytics a month ago, but if I hadn't opened an account at Sitemeter.com, I would have given  up blogging a long time ago. Being able to see how many visits your blog is getting, even though  it's not very much, allows to see that at least people are reading the fruit of your labour, even  though the comments are not always there to show it.


Thank you so so so so so much to everyone who gave me their views on the topic. I feel it has opened  my eyes. Will it stop me from being upset if a post dear to me doesn't trigger my idea of what a satisfying amount of comments is? Of course not but I am now reassured that we are all in the same boat, doing our thing, in a growing beauty  blogging community.


Please cherish every comment you get, even if it's just a brief and simple one. I do. If you’re still upset, go follow @loulou699, she’ll cheer you up, in less time it would take you to decipher a captcha

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