Saturday, November 26, 2011

Do you need to follow to read?

I've recently learned as of March 2012 the GFC (more commonly known as the "follow me" button) will not work on non-blogger blogs.

My first blog was a blogger domain and there are many things about that interface that I miss. However, after someone hacked my google email address I came dangerously close to losing a year's worth of work, an experience I'm not willing to repeat.

bethfred.com supports RSS feeds, but GFC is my primary follower source. I have the best followers in the world. With everything going on in my life until this Wed I'd been unable to blog in nearly one month and lost only one follower. I thank you guys so much for sticking with me through this all. Now I have a question for you. How important is a follower button? Would you still read my blog without it, or maybe not because you wouldn't know when it had been updated? Should I try to add network blogs or some other follower method, or should I just not worry about it?

I really need your input on this one. Part of me wants to remember that I didn't have a follower button (unbeknown to me) and thus no followers for the first six months I blogged, and although it was disheartening I maintained quality posts. But then I can't help but wonder if I would be impossible to find without some sort of follower button.  What do you think?

7 comments:

  1. I'm going to miss my GFC widget, too. I hate that they are doing this. I wish I had a solution. My website has a different follow method, but it doesn't show all my followers--only the ones who create profiles and many don't.

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  2. I'm so cyber-challenged I don't really understand allof what you're talking about, but NO FOLLOW BUTTOM. Are you kidding me? Those followers are like making up for the Valentines you never got when you were sixteen. Also,I have a lot of friends who follow me but do not blog. What happens to them. Now that I think about this my site will tell me that I have 19 followers some days and then I have 44 followers others,maybe this is somehow connected.Like I said cyber-challenged and I'm blond too. Regardless,if I understand this correctly it's a big bummer.

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  3. You're site is blogger so you'll keep your follower button, but blogger (and gfc) does have a lot of technical issues (one of the reasons I like wordpress better) and that's why sometimes you have 19 followers and sometimes you have 44. It used to happen to me all the time.

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  4. What do you think about having a duplicate blog on blogger? That way people who come to ur site can see your blog and followers could follow you on blogger. I know Maggie Stiefvater has both wordpress and blogger (although I know I'm not a best seller).

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  5. I wish they were keeping GFC for non-Blogger sites; I usually find that it's easier to just click Join/Follow on a site than manually add it to Google Reader or another aggregator. I think people will still be able to find blogs, though, regardless of the change, through comments and links on other people's sites.

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  6. Because I read so many posts when I blog, I usually see only those in my dashboard that show up during my morning blogging time (Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays). I blog later on too, but that's to respond to bloggers who've left comments during the day.

    Unfortunately I can't manually add any non blogger blogs to my dashboard anymore (too full). But Blogger does left me follow other Blogger blogs.

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  7. Follower buttons don't matter to me. Content does. One thing I noticed though...when I tried to click on your name from the email I received earlier, it took me to your old blog. So for some reason your Blogger profile is still attached to when you make comments?? Anyway, no worries. We'll find you :D

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