Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Followers Widget - What's it All About?



I have been blogging for about a year and a half now. Over the course of time, Blogger is constantly upgrading and adding new features. One such feature is the Followers Widget. Now, what exactly is the Followers Widget you ask. Well, I believe it is a button you put in your sidebar that allows visitors and fans of your site, with the click of a button, to follow your blog.

Now, I don't really understand everything about this following process, but here is what I do know: I have a blog and a blogger profile with blogger. So whenever I follow a blog, either by clicking the followers widget or adding the blog into my reading list, the feed from that blog appears in my blogger dashboard. Those of you who use blogger know what the dashboard is. This is just lovely, as I can head to one screen and see at a glance those blogs that I am following, what they have posted recently in chronological order.

But here is my question: If you don't use blogger and say you either don't have a blog or have a blog through another site, how do you receive the feed? I can follow blogs that are not run through blogger, but I wonder if they can follow me. Am I making sense here? If anyone has the answer to the question, feel free to comment. Any information would be welcome, as I am still learning and things are constantly changing.

To be on the cutting edge of blogging technology (did you sense the sarcasm?), I have added the followers widget to my sidebar. Feel free to give it a try and let me know if it worked for you, especially non blogging followers (those that don't blog with blogger).

8 comments:

Mandi said...

I know I can follow blogs through Google Reader, instead of Blogger. But that is the extent of my knowlege..LOL.

Tracy said...

Good question - unfortunately I have no answer. I don't "follow" anyone on blogger or on google reader. I get so inundated and then feel like I'm a loser for falling behind. :) I can't go blogging every day so I hate to see what I've missed, if that makes any sense. :)

SarahT said...

Don't get me started on widgets! I use WordPress and I'm still getting to grips with the whole thing. No idea on the follow thing. I'm such a tech idiot that I only recently discovered I could actually subscribe to blogs. I still haven't gotten around to doing so, though. You're all saved in my favourites folder!

Bob & Muffintop said...

I put the followers widget on my sidebar & promptly ignored it. LOL :) Don't know what it does except that you can track back to their blogs via the widget. My personal favorite is the reader (which is where I follow you from, lol). The drawback to using the reader is that your titles have to really catch my attention for me to stop by & say "hi there" & stick my oar in the water. You're ahead of me since you're on Twitter & I refuse to be sucked in. :)

~Amanda

Vicki said...

I follow approximately 600 (yes, six hundred) blogs on Google Reader. If ever the number of unread blogs seems overwhelming, I go to "All items" on the left hand side, then mark everything as read. Then I start afresh.

Marg said...

I won't be following, but I do read your blog through Bloglines. The main reason why I don't follow is because I already have so many blog to read through RSS feeds that I don't need to double up on some of those by following on Blogger as well!

Amy said...

I know I have some followers, but I can't even get a gravatar to work on blog sites other than Blogger so I'm probably not one to comment. LOL

Jill D. said...

Okay, I was on VampireFanGirl's website and she had the FOLLOW button on her site. When I clicked on it to follow her it gave me the option of what blog reader to follow her in. I could choose google, bloglines or yahoo. There may have been more choices, but I can't remember. I will have to update this post with this information.

Vicki - Holy cow girl! That is a crazy number of blogs to be following. I think I am following just under 100 and that is more than I can keep up with.

Amanda - I am the same way. I like to scroll through everybody's posts and then choose the ones that interest me the most.