Monday, February 15, 2010

How to "Follow" your favorite blog

Ok first let me just say, I am probably gonna mess this up because I totally do not know all of the right technical lingo. But my sweet cousin asked a good question about this topic and I thought I would attempt to help. Please excuse me if I call something by the wrong name…I'd LOVE if anyone sees something wrong, please let me know so I can correct this post. Thank you!

Some blogs (a lot of those on Blogger) have the "follow with Google Friend Connect" application. To follow a blog all you have to do is click the button that says "follow". Then you will be asked to sign in. I have a Google account so I click that and then I type in my email address and password. Then a box pops up that says "follow this blog" and allows you to choose from 2 options:
1) follow publicly - which I do so that the blog owner knows I'm following their blog
or
2) follow privately - which I guess anyone can do if they want to but feels a little stalker-ish and creepy to me because I am keeping up with a blog but not telling anyone about it.

Now other blogs (like my Aunt Lynna's over at Okie Sister) don't have the "follow" button because they use a different type of application. She has a button on her blog that says "subscribe" and if you want to subscribe to her blog feed you type in your email address and click subscribe. When you do that, it brings up an email subscription request. Just type in the verification code and click on the button that says "complete subscription request". Then you are done. Now you will receive email updates when their is a new post on her blog.

BUT if you're like me, you probably get about a bazillion emails a day. And while I definitely want to know when my favorite blogs are updated, I would prefer to check my favorite blogs on my own instead of receiving an email about new content.

In that case, if you have a blog then you can customize your blog template and add a section kind of links to your favorite blogs (like in the right column here that say "Friends and Family's Blogs"). This is where it gets a little tricky. Right now I have a little one that is saying "Wants to pick you up please Mama". I'm guessing he needs my attention.  I'll do a post next about how to make simple modifications to your Blogger template.
Hope this helps, Sara. Stay tuned.

3 comments:

Marmy Mommy said...

Thank you!
Hope you had a nice Valentines Day!

Amy said...

No problem! Did this answer your question? I forgot to tell you how to "unfollow" a blog.

To do this, you just log into blogger and go to your "dashboard" (should be the 1st thing you see when you log into your Blogger account.) In the middle of the page you should see a tab that says "Reading List". Under this will be a list of all of the blogs that you follow. Click the "Manage" link. This brings up a list of all of the blogs you follow. Beside the blog you want to "unfollow" click on Settings.
This brings up a page and in the middle of the page on the right hand side it should say "stop following this blog". Click that and it will ask you if you are sure. Click Yes and now you officially "unfollow" the blog.
Did I make a mess of that explanation or does that make sense? Hope this helped!!!

Amy said...
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