Styling the social bar

Tweet

When Google released the "Social Bar", which is easy to add to your Blogger blog, earlier on this year there was some griping that it couldn't be styled.
Well I noticed this morning that things have now been changed so that you can style the social bar (almost) to match your sites colours.

I say almost because the styling only affects the areas which pop-up containing the "activity stream" or comment etc, so the style the bar itself remains the standard light blue colour.
Still it is nice that these changes have been made available.

Read on ...

Follow me on Twitter!

Tweet

"I is now doin' Twitter!"

Feel free to say Hi, pass on any info, let me know when I'm wrong about something, and generally interact.

I'm planning on monitoring any changes with the way GFC and Twitter interact, so follow me to keep up to date.

Read on ...

Profile [Friend Connect] changes

Tweet

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Google just sneaked in some big changes to Friend connect that make a great deal of sense.

The only impetus previously, for connecting the profile you use on a Friend Connect site, to one you already had, was if you didn't want to re-write the same information.

Connecting your Google profile was in fact a bit of a pain, because and links you may have added to the description text, don't show up when the information appears in something like a "members gadget" on a site you have "joined" (or followed if it's a standard Blogspot hosted blog).

The changes still don't parse links added to the description text, but now if you use a different profile (and yes that does include something like Twitter) your name is linked directly to your Google profile page!

This may be the first time that Facebook think "uh oh deary me" as, if Facebook hadn't left the party, presumably if you wanted to used your Facebook profile, then your name would have linked directly back to your Facebook page.

It makes most sense to connect and use your Google profile, because landing at something like a Twitter page gives only snippets of any conversations you may be having and only one link (on your Twitter page), where as you can add a multitude of information and links to your Google profile.


One word of warning: it looks like if you choose to connect to Google but haven't set up your Google profile or it isn't public yet then people land at a "profile not found" page. So make sure you have your profile set-up properly before trying to connect to one!

Lastly, it should be noted that this is a pro-site setting.
So if you change this it will affect all the sites you join from now on (unless you change this setting for any one site), but it is not a blaket change that will apply to all the sites you have joined up to now!

Please visit the post page to comment or Tweet about this post!
:-)

Read on ...

New Friend Connect Recommendations Gadget

Tweet

Things are hotting up for Friend Connect with another new gadget this time from Google released today.

The new recommend gadget is great for letting your readers push your best content forward.

You can try it out here, as I've already added it to the site!

Read a few posts and "recommend" the ones you like!

Edit: I had implemented the recommendation button on post pages, but after a tip I found here I now have them showing on the main page too!

Read on ...

Chat gadget for Google friend connect

Tweet

This is hot news!

It's been quite frustrating for many with the slower than expected take up of Friend Connect, so it's great to see ClackPoint come up with something that shows a little bit of what is possible.

Try it out on this site here

Do me a favour and please link back to the site when you post about this very new Google Friend Connect news!

Read on ...

Activity bar changes?

Tweet

Noticed today that the number of activities shown in the activity bar has been drastically cut.

I didn't document how many were prieviously shown (shoddy work), but in my memory the count was somewhere towards the 100 mark.
Now the activity bar shows only the last 10 activities which is OK here, but much too few for busy sites!

Hope this is just a hiccup until Google nips out, buys, and bolts on some more computers.

Some notice or information about this change from the blog would have been nice: come on Google!

image credit

Read on ...

Hello Twitter (Grrr)

Tweet

Today twitter made some changes to @relies which are causing some commotion.
From now on you need to be following someone before you can send them an @reply.
This smacks a little like censorship: why?
Well if I'm walking down the street I could talk to anyone I walk past, but the changes Twitter have made mean basically that I can only talk to people who I have a relationship with (people I follow).

It would have been more appropriate I think to allow people to choose this as a setting for their account e.g. a "only receive replies from people I follow" rather than introducing this as a blanket setting.
You can after all always choose to block a user who sends too many unwanted @replies in your direction.

Interesting to see if people can raise enough fuss to get Twitter to change their mind.

Read on ...

Add the social bar on Blogger

Tweet

To add the social bar to your Blogger blog, hop over to Friend Connect.

After you login you will most probably see your blog already listed. This is because the "followers" gadget is Google Friend Connect wearing slightly different clothes.
If not then you'll need to set up your site to use Friend Connect first.

Click the social bar link and set the social bar up to work how you want it to.
E.g. You can set it to appear at the top or bottom of the page, feature or not feature a comment gadget etc.

Because I am already using GFC for commenting I didn't want the comments gadget in the social bar on this site, but using trhe social bar is actually a very easy way to use GFC for commenting on your blog. Set the gadget scope to "page" and then each URL will have it's own related comments.
The downside in doing this is that people don't tend to realize this and just make comments willy-nilly.

Once you are happy with the ways you have set it up, click the button to generate the code, copy it and head back to Blogger.

Adding the actual code:
Remember to download your template before touching it!
There are several ways to do this but I prefer clicking the layouts tab then the EDIT HTML second level tab and pasting the code into the template.
Just past the social bar code directly after the < body > tag (the body tag is quite some way down in Blogger templates, after all the style declarations); save your template, and view your blog to see your new social bar working!

Read on ...

Friend Connect comments translation

Tweet

Friend Connect comments now include comment translating!

It should be noted that the "comments gadget" is just the old wall gadget, which has been re-named and improved with the translating feature.
The new feature doesn't seem to be showing up currently, but the official post indicates that this new feature will show up in code generated before the feature release.

Read on ...

Friend Connect improvements

Tweet

There have been a number of changes made to Friend Connect over the past few days.

Firstly the landing page has been tarted up, and given a look more in line with some of the other product landing pages (like adsense and adwords etc).

The admin page has also been given a work over.

If you have added Friend connect to your Blogger blog via the friend connect site, rather than running with the "follow" gadget implementation you will be seeing TWO implementations of Friend connect in your admin area.

You can safely delete one of them if this bothers you, by clicking site settings and deleting it from there.
Unfortulatly (for me) there seems to be a bug in the way things have been picked up for me. As the "follower gadget version" (the one that's not expanded in the screen shot) does NOT have a site settings link. So I can't currently delete the clone that's cluttering my admin panel.

EDIT: If you see a "clone" version of your blogger blog in your FC control panel do not delete it.
As I was a Friend Connect early bird I was able to add FC to this blog using the "standard sites" method (because FC wasn't fully supported by the Followers gadget at that point). This "loop hole" has now been closed, so just use the Blogger option.
I'm left using GFC for standard sites and removed the Blogger version, which is causing a canvas problem :-(

Read on ...

RPC call error: Poll Gadget

Tweet

I've seen this error pop up a few times.
It's obviously related to a call that the poll gadget is making.
The poll gadget is evidently still being tinkered with somewhat by the developer.
I have seen changes visually, e.g. originally it said #vote(s) cast but now uses the more logical term #voter(s) (as you can allow voters to pick more than one answer with a poll if you wish.

The error only happens occasionally and if any problem (blank gadget) persists, it seems to be cured by clearing the browser cache, which indicates that a new visitor would not be left with a non rendered gadget.

All in all it is good to know that the developer is working on improvments to the gadget, which means the error should be cleaned up soon.

Any other comments about this gadget?

Read on ...

Get answers gadget: review

Tweet

I took a look at the new "Get Answers" gadget the other day for a different site of mine (yes I have other sites!), and although I like the concept very much it didn't hack it for me for two reasons.

1. You can customise the colors yet. I attempted to skin the gadget in the normal fashion, but that failed to work. The developer responded to a question stating that Google hasn't opened up the skining API yet, but I am not sure of the validity of that.

2. "What Google says": I guess the developer is adept at using the AJAX Search API and is also looking at monetizing the gadget at a later date. But for me the integration of "What Google says" was flawed. So after a morning testing I did not implement the use of this gadget into the site in question.

Read on ...