I don’t use the new Blogger templates because I have worked hard creating my own templates and I host them on my own domains and not blogspot.com. Blogger has some interesting widgets that are not available to me. One of them, Blogger Following, is an interesting social sort of device that allows readers to follow a blog. By following a blog you can get some interesting benefits, such as having your picture displayed (it is, after all, a social feature). You can integrate your followed blogs into iGoogle and google feeds so you can read blogs without actually having to click all of the different urls.

I thought that it was a shame that this functionality was denied me, so I decided to do a little reverse engineering. I discovered that I could add a "Follow My Blog" link and a "Show Followers" link quite easily. Counting the actual number of followers and displaying their pictures on my blog was a little further than I wanted to go, although it would be doable. I am just not interested in staring at you silly faces every time I check my blog.

Here is the (very) simple html links to add anywhere on your blog. The blog id is mine, so make sure that you go to blogger.com and check your blog id before adding these links to your web page.

<a href="http://www.blogger.com/follow-blog.g?blogID=5695891" target="_blank" style="font-size:x-small">follow this blog</a>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/followers.g?blogID=5695891&amp;blogTitle=Wandering" style="font-size:x-small">see followers</a>

Copy the two lines above and paste them into your html. Change 5695891 to your blog id and "Bob’s your Uncle".

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Now, if you have a blogger blog, please follow my blog by clicking the link on my menu line. You can un-follow me later, but I’d like to see how it works. I’ll click on your blog and follow you for a bit. It is also nice to see if people actually read these techno-geek posts of mine.

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