The past week(s) have been a little turbulent in terms of news for those in the blogging world, and I thought I just summarize what’s been happening and share my 2 cents on it all.
1. Goodbye Google Friend Connect (for non-Blogspot/Blogger users)
For those of you who do not use Blogspot/Blogger might have already heard that Google Friend Connect will cease to work for you on non-Blogspot/Blogger platforms like WordPress. Not to panic though – good blogging etiquette is to offer your readers as many possibilities of subscribing to your blog anyways – not everyone likes to use Google Friend Connect, even when they use Blogger/Blogspot.
A few alternatives are: email subscription, bloggers.com, Facebook fan page, BlogLovin‘ (which can automatically post your blogposts to your Facebook page and post a link to your blogpost on Twitter), NetworkedBlogs (which can also automatically post your blogposts to your Facebook page and to Twitter), RSS feed (which can also post automatically to Twitter), Tumblr (you can automatically have your RSS feed imported into your Tumblr and also then post it to Twitter and your Facebook page). So there’s a lot more options for you out there, even without GFC!
There is one downside: PR companies like Google Friend Connect and sometimes forget that x number of subscribers on GFC doesn’t mean you have only those x number of subscribers. I hope the PR companies will catch up on this and will not rely on GFC stats alone – this could be disadvantageous!
2. Goodbye Picnic
The popular free online picture editor Picnic is being disabled (or relocated into Google+) in April. Lots of you like Picnic – it’s a great tool to edit pictures on the go instead of owning a full-on photo editing programme. Fret not! There are alternatives out there!
Even though I have Adobe Photoshop, I mostly use iPiccy and Pixlr - you can crop, resize, edit colour, saturation, hue, etc – you can add filters and whatnot. Anything really that can leave your pictures look amazing!
3. Hello Blogger/Blogspot Commenting with Reply!
Last week saw the integration of the reply option in Blogger/Blogspot‘s commenting system – FINALLY! Most of you just accepted the fact that replying hadn’t been an option – unless you were on WordPress or were resorting to Disqus and the like (like me!) No more! Blogger has finally got reply options.
There are 2 requirements though to get that option:
1. You need to have your blog feed set to ‘full’ (Blogger > Settings > Site Feed > Allow Blog Feeds > Full) 2. Have your comments ‘embedded’ (Blogger > Settings > Comments > Comment Form Placement > Embedded)
Please note: Some of you might still not get the reply stuff, even when you have set it up correctly. This can be because the template (=blog design) you are using could be old, could have been edited (I don’t mean the CSS part, but parts of the actual code that displays the content of the blog, etc), so that the code for the reply stuff is missing. For example, I have this issue – which is why I’m still on Disqus. But for my new blog design, that’s coming in February, I managed to fix the template so that I can get replies! If your reply-option doesn’t display, let me know, and I’ll try and fix it for you! Alternatively you can still switch to Disqus – I’ve written an easy tutorial for that too!
I hope you found these 3 little topics helpful. If you have any further questions, post them in the comments below – I will try and answer all questions and comments!