Google Friend Connect and Wordpress

In my next post in my series of posts about Followers and blog traffic, I'll focus a bit more on Google Friend Connect, and then explain how to add it to your Wordpress blog, if you have one.

You see that image to the left? That's my Google Friend Connect widget, as it looks when I'm logged in. See how the top half is the members (followers) of my blog, and then the bottom half is my friends?

Yep. There are some pretty famous people in that bottom half. People like Simon C. Larter, Nicole Ducleroir, Jeff Beesler, Jon Arnston, Frankie Diane Mallis, and so on.

Anyway, I just wanted to demonstrate about the friends function in Google Friend Connect. It's not something I use often, but it can be useful if I find a great new writing blog, and want to easily invite all my friends to follow it as well. It's really quite simple.

According to another friend of mine, Susan Quinn, you can also use Google Friend Connect to send mass updates to announce things like Blog Tours, Book Releases, and so on. I've never done this, but knowing Google, I would think it's probably not that complicated.

Now let's get down to the nuts and bolts, and talk about how to add the Google Friend Connect follower widget to your wordpress blog. I'm basically stealing this walkthrough from this site: Expand2Web, by Don Campbell. So please give him all the credit.

How To Add Friend Connect To Your WordPress Blog

Here are the steps to add Friend Connect to your WordPress Blog.

1. Log into Friend Connect at http://www.google.com/friendconnect/home/

2. Click on the “Set Up A New Site” button. This will walk you through a short process.

3. Upload files - canvas.html and rpc_relay.html to the root directory of your blog.

Note: Google has simplified this step and you no longer need to upload these files. The process will ask you for the name and URL to your website that’s it! (as of Oct 2, 2009)

4. Get the code for the “Members Gadget”

5. Go into WordPress Admin -> Design -> Widgets (this assumes you are using a widget enabled theme.)

6. Create a Text Widget, give it a title, and insert the HTML code into the the Widget.

Now people can join your site as members. They can see other members on your site and meet them. You might want to consider adding some other Friend Connect Gadgets to the site now.

And that's that! Obviously the biggest advantage to "following" and Google Friend Connect is that it's the easiest way to keep up to date on what's going on with the blogs you're interested in. Could you imagine manually checking the blogs you follow every day? Only to find that they hadn't posted in a few weeks? That would be such a hassle.

Also: followers make you look cool. And popular.

UPDATE: Thanks to Rogue Mutt, I now know this only works on wordpress blogs that pay for their own domain, or something like that. If you have a free wordpress blog, it doesn't work. I have no idea why. I'll try to research some more.

Analysis of Followers

For my second post this week of focusing on followers, I'm going to start out by analyzing the results of yesterday's post.

Before I posted the Follower Project yesterday, I had 755 followers. I now have 774. That's an increase of 19.

Now that may not sound like much, but in my experience, 19 is astronomically high for a single day, especially considering the fact that I have not had time yet to visit all the blogs suggested (I'll get to that after writing this post) and some of the blogs I did visit probably have not had time to follow me back yet.

So, in short, as far as I'm concerned, my idea worked. Hopefully it will continue to work. I may also talk Alex into doing some kind of blog-fest which is an extension of the idea. As writers, published, agented, aspiring, or otherwise, there's no reason not for us to all know each other. As far as I'm concerned, we're all in this together.

Now, I want to talk a little bit more about following, Google Friend Connect, and the follower widget. As Adam pointed out yesterday, and I'm sure many of you know, there are many ways to follow blogs. Personally, I don't subscribe via email, RSS (real simple syndication), or atom (whatever that is, I don't even know), because my inbox is already choked, and I happen to care a lot about being very responsive to email. But I know I have readers who follow me that way, and while I would prefer people use the GFC widget, because it let's me see your face (or Yoda avatar), and gives me an opportunity to follow you back, I don't mind if a reader prefers another method.

There is also another way to follow blogs without using GFC, and without showing up in the follower widget, that will still cause the blog's new posts to show up in your blogspot dashboard and your Google reader. Have you noticed this toolbar:

It will show up as different colors on different blogs (it's clear on mine), but as long as you're reading a blogspot blog, it should always be there. Using this toolbar to follow gives you the option to follow privately. I'm not really sure why you would want to do that, but the option is there.

Come back tomorrow for more talk about Following, and to learn how to add the Google Friend Connect Widget to your Wordpress Blog, if you would like people to be able to follow you that way.

In the meantime, you should really read Rachael Harrie's first post about the topic of Followers and Following, she really breaks down the whole subject a lot better than I do.

Now I'm off to introduce myself to the rest of the blogs you guys suggested yesterday.