Google Friend Connect is Going Away

This is not my normal subject matter, so bear with me a minute while I *try* to get technical.

It seems that Google has been doing a bit of spring cleaning.  Besides doing away with my beloved Picnik, STUPIDMEANDICTATORJERKS as of March 1st Google will also discontinue Google Friend Connect for all non-Google blogs.  Since I am a WordPress blog, that means that I will be one of the things taken out with the trash! Talk about making a girl feel good, right?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Google friend connect, this is what it looks like.  It’s usually found in the sidebar of a blog and is a way for readers to follow a blog using their Blogger dashboard.

If you use some other application to keep up with your favorite blogs, you should not be affected…but at this point I’m not really sure how exactly this will pan out so here’s how to make sure you don’t  lose me just in case.

If you look in sidebar, this is what you should see.

See these little buttons?  They all have a function.  The star leads to my Facebook page, the heart to my Twitter page, the square to my RSS feed, the circle to Pinterest, and the envelope is an email form.

Now I’ve had a few people tell me that the links are broken, and that’s not the case.  The gray is just a bit confusing.  It makes them appear to be “grayed-out”.  I know that it throws people off so we’re working on a fix.  In the meantime, to click on any option, roll over them with your mouse, and it should appear colored, like so.

This means that it’s active.  Click there and it should take you where you want to go.

Now, I will try to keep the rest of this short and sweet because I know it’s boring.

I’m going to skip the whole Facebook and Twitter things because that’s pretty self explanatory…

Today I want to explain how to follow via RSS feed {in the best way I know how}.  See the red button?  That’s the way you subscribe to my feed.

Click there and it will take you to a screen like this.

Head on over to the subscribe box and click on your preferred reader.

I use Google Reader to keep up with my favorites which looks like this.

It works for me.

If you don’t want to follow via reader you can also FOLLOW VIA EMAIL.  For help with that, click HERE.

Now, I’m not even to pretend to be all techy and understand the ins and outs of all this, so, I am pretty sure there are questions unanswered and other options available.  So on that note, instead of opening my mouth and making myself look stupid by talking about things I don’t understand, I’m going to point you in the direction of other interesting and informative posts on the subject.

• Ways to follow The Crafting Chicks {Google Friend Connect is going away!} via The Crafting Chicks
• Google Cancels Google Friend Connect & What That Means for You via Independent Fashion Bloggers
• Google Friend Connect is Going Away–But You Don’t Have To via Angela Scott–Whimsy & Writing

As of today, I don’t have Blog Lovin’ and all that, but I am working on it and will let you know what I come up with.

In the meantime, here’s the short version:

Follow me on Facebook HERE

Follow me on Twitter HERE

Follow me via RSS HERE

Follow via email HERE

Follow me on Pinterest HERE

and if you aren’t tired of me by then you can even EMAIL ME.

I hope you will forgive me for this long technical post on a Saturday.  I’ll make it up to you with lots and lots of cookies from here on out.