In So Many Words

Someone asked me the other day how to “follow” my blog, and I quickly realized they were referring to the Google Friend Connect widgets that are ubiquitous on Blogger blogs. My first instinct was to let them know this was a WordPress blog and suggest that they subscribe to my feed, but then I decided to do a quick search and see if it was possible to get in on the following fun.

And guess what, it is! You can add Google Friend Connect to a WordPress blog (at least a self-hosted one, which is what I have – I have no idea about a WordPress.com blog).

It was really easy too, which is always a good thing in my book; the whole process took about ten minutes.

Here’s what I had to do (disclaimer – this may be slightly different for you, but I’m just sharing how it worked for me):

1. Signed in with my Google ID (my Gmail username and password).
2. Under “Set up a new site,” selected the option for a standard website (as opposed to a Blogger blog).
3. Filled in the information about my site.
4. Downloaded the two files they provided, and then uploaded them to my site (I wasn’t sure what folder to put them in so I just put them in the main file area and it worked okay).
5. Configured the members widget and then pasted the code they gave me into a widget on my sidebar.

You can see what it looks like in my sidebar. It seems that if I put it in my post, the sidebar widget won’t show up, which I’m guessing has something to do with trying to run the same script in two places on the same page. Hey, I never said I actually knew anything about computers!

Of course, I had to test it out, so I joined myself and, sure enough, it shows up on my Blogger profile and on my Blogger Dashboard as a blog I am following. Pretty cool, huh?

If you are reading this in a feed and don’t see a black box with the word “decide” on it, click here to visit the post.

Go ahead, click on it! Enjoy your Saturday!!

Isn’t this the neatest button? I can’t remember where I first saw it, but I got it from twittercounter.com. I have gone on and off Twitter over the last few months, but I am starting to get back into the socializing mode again now.

If you are on Twitter, please feel free to leave your username/link in the comments, and you can follow me if you’d like – my user name is wheresthebox.

I have been having fun playing around with various features on my blog and have had a couple of questions about them, so I thought I would post about what I have done and where I got the information from.

Archives, Recent Posts & Recent Comments

First of all, I started thinking that the archives were looking a little long to scroll through, since they defaulted to having the current month open, but I didn’t like the weekly one any better, so I decided to put up a widget for recent posts and then just use a dropdown menu for the archives.

There are various tutorials for recent posts and recent comments, but before I got around to trying them out, I saw that Blogger had the option to add a feed to your blog. So I just added one page element with my posts feed and another page element with my comments feed and put them where I wanted them. Blogger will only show up to 5 items, so you probably need to use one of the tutorials if you want more than that or a different layout.

Label Cloud

When I first started blogging, I wasn’t sure if I liked tag clouds, but over time have grown to appreciate them. As I began using more labels, the list seemed too long and cumbersome to be user-friendly, so I used the instructions from phydeaux3 to make my Blogger labels appear in a tag cloud and then tweaked the color and size until I was happy with it. I think it is more visually appealing and intuitive that a straight list.

Table of Contents

I found this through Blogging Tips (this post has links to 15 different widgets or scripts for Blogger blogs, including the label cloud above). The Table of Contents instructions are from Beautiful Beta, and there is an update I will have to look at when my posts get over 100. I had to configure it a little since my column width is different from his, but it worked perfectly and was the easiest to install of everything I have do so far.

What’s cool about the TOC is that you toggle it on and off from the sidebar, but it shows up in the posts column. You can sort the list ascending or descending by post title or by date, or you can click on a label to see all posts with that label. To return to the full list from one label, you simply click the label header. Even if nobody else ever uses this, I will, and it only shows up if you click on it, so it doesn’t detract from the appearance of the site.

Related Posts

I have seen this in some of the feeds I read and inevitably find myself clicking on one of the related posts and usually finding something of interest that way. As Amanda mentions, there are two versions of this; I chose to go with Hoctro’s original hack. It is set to show up at the bottom of both the main page and the individual post pages, and I limited the number of labels and posts that would show from the original code to keep the list shorter. I’m not exactly sure how to put it in my feed, but that can wait for another day!

Other than being a lot of fun to learn, all of these things will hopefully work together to help people easily find what content is of most interest to them. So that’s what I have been up to lately, in between all the stuff of daily living.

Oh, I almost forgot, one other change I am making is to my user name, changing it from Holding It Together to WherestheBox. The choice of WherestheBox comes from my URL and the fact that I have been using that name in other places around the net, but the primary reason for the change has to do with a revelation I had recently about my need to just be myself and not try so hard to “hold it together” all the time. If I am going to do that, I felt I needed to let go of the name. Anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!