A Good Time is Blog Time

One of the primary objectives of any blogger should be to build a blog community, people who are interested enough in the topic of the blog  to register that interest and follow the blog. Otherwise what would be the point of writing and publishing a blog on the Internet that potentially no one ever reads.

Some bloggers do want to restrict their blog to private members, friends and family which can be done by restricting the access of the search engines and marking the blog private access only, so the blog community in this case becomes more of a private club than a public house.

For the vast majority of us however we are looking for a wider audience and are reaching out to find people who can possibly become friends who share a common interest, loyal customers who wish to purchase products or services or are simply interested in the information you are providing, whatever category they fit into there is normally a need to interact with you and share what they find with other people.

It makes sense then to make these objectives relatively easy to achieve, most people when they visit a blog want to process their interaction swiftly i.e. they want to spend their time communicating, gathering information or making a purchase without struggling to find the functionality that allows them to do that. Some of the things your average site visitor wants to do: -

• Find a subject of interest to read if they happen upon your blog casually – clear navigation
• Find the information, product or service they are looking for if they came to you for a specific purpose – clear navigation
• To easily post a comment or ask a question – comment boxes
• Mark the site for future reference, assuming they found what they want – social bookmarking icons
• Follow the blog or have updates delivered via email – RSS Feeds
• Subscribe to the blog so that they are kept informed when updates are made – site registration tools

There will be more and the comments box awaits if you feel there are other important factors that need to be included so please have your say.

The beauty of the most popular blogging platforms is that they have recognised all these needs and provide the tools that allow you to meet these requirements in a professional and easily applied manner, but it is up to the webmaster to utilise these tools and put them in place.

One of these tools is ‘Google Friend Connect‘ , this is a device that easily gives people who want to follow your blog an option for registering and sharing your blog with their friends. If they are already registered with ‘Friend Connect’ then literally all they need to do is sign in, it comes as a standard gadget in ‘Blogspot Blogs’ so is very easy to add into your blog when using that platform.

As I was already using friend connect I decided it would be a good idea to utilise it on my other blogs that use the ‘WordPress‘  platform. Adding it is a little more involved but by no means beyond the scope of man and it also comes with a reasonable level of functionality that you can either choose to use or not use as you see fit.

How I added Google Friend Connect to my WordPress Blog

Use the link above to go to the site, if you are not registered then you will need to go through the registration process, once registered you will be able to access the ‘Set up a new site screen’ where you click on the option for ‘Friend Connect for standard web sites’.

Select standard web sites

You will then get a screen that tells you the stages you need to go through as an overview.

Overview

Just click continue to go to the next screen where you enter the site details, title, URL and language. You can choose to select a language or let it automatically configure the language depending on geographic location, I choose to use English. Click on continue once you are finished.

Add your site details and language choice

There are 2 files on the next screen both of which can be down loaded using the download buttons. I chose to download both my files to a directory which I call downloads so I knew where they were.

Download the required files

Now you need to upload these files to your web site server, I am assuming you know how to do this as you have a blog or website that you have previously uploaded, personally I was able to use the convenience of CPanel as I host with Hostgator, where I just logged in went through the ‘file manager’ to my server directory and from there used the upload button to upload the 2 files. Once I had done that I went to the next screen in friend connect that allows you to test that you have placed the files in the right location.

Test to finalize set up

You are now presented with a screen where you can get the code for the members gadget.

Get code for the members gadget

Click on the link and you will go to the configuration page, you will note that you can choose width, number of rows of pictures of members and the colours you want for your gadget. The minimum width you can choose is 200px so if you are fitting it into a sidebar, then ideally you want your sidebar to be a minimum of 200px so that it will fit uniformly.

Configure your gadget

Once configured you can get the code which you need to copy and paste into a suitable location on your site, I chose to place it in the sidebar and used the text option in widgets to place the code in my sidebar. This is relatively easy to do, you just click on ‘widgets’ under the Appearance category and drag the text box into the sidebar in the position you want it, then open the box and paste the code into the box (the text box can be used for html, an alternative is to add an html plugin and use that), click on save and then visit the site to see how it looks.

If everything is OK then you are done, if you want to make changes then you can go back to friend connect modify the gadget as required and then repeat the process of getting and pasting the code.

When you are finished you will have the ability to easily start building a blog community interested in your blog or website, one which is easy to register with and join which after all was the point of this exercise. If you like what you find on this blog then I would encourage you to use this new facility and register your interest.