Feedly "follow" button

Just a couple of days ago, I did a Goodbye Google Reader post and one of the questions was about a Feedly Follow button.  I had talked about a Feedly button months ago and promised to tell you when they had an official button - but I hadn't looked in awhile.  Guess what?  They have a follow button!!

Here are a variety of Publisher Tools for Feedly.  One of them is "Add a feedly button to your site"!

You do need to use your feed URL (instead of just your blog address).

• For blogger, it's your blog address plus "/feeds/posts/default".  For example, my blog feed address is http://joyfulcreationswithkim.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

• For other blog types, I don't know the details, but if you have your own blog in feedly (I LOVE to see my own posts come up in feedly) - you can check it:
• Bring up just your own blog in feedly by clicking on it in the left column
• On the main screen, right click on your blog name and select Inspect Element - a bunch of techie stuff will come up at the bottom of the screen
• The highlighted part of the techie stuff is your blog name.  Scan across it until you find data-feedid="feed/.
• The address after that starting with "http up until the next " is your feed URL.

The feedly button creator asks you to pick a button, give your feed URL, and then it asks you to click on the button to make sure it works.  I was slightly confused here as it sends you to feedly - you do have to hit the back button in your browser after that to go back to the button creator.  But then the code is there and it tells you how to add it to each type of blog!

For those of you struggling to get around feedly (or bloglovin or anything else new) - just remember - there is a learning curve to each of these.  I did an intro to Feedly in March which will help but know that Feedly has literally gotten millions of new customers since the Google Reader announcement and they have done an admirable job of updating their product to recognize the needs of those millions.  

Some of the things that I said feedly didn't do - it now does!!  For example, you can pin to Pinterest directly from feedly.  It also only worked in certain desktop browsers, there are more options now - details here.

And a few things have moved around, for example, you used to add blogs via a tiny little magnifying glass on the right side of feedly; now they have an obvious "+Add Content" on the left side.

The biggest thing to make you happier in feedly on your desktop is the magic j/k key to move between posts.  (iPad is easy - just swipe).  Feedly has keyboard shortcuts.  One of those is the "j" button.  When you bring up your first post to read and are done reading it, just hit "j" on the keyboard and the desktop will swipe to the next post!!  (Or use "k" to go backwards.)

It is a pain and I have a sinking feeling there is more to come from Google (see the annoying Follow button details on this post).  I really mourn the loss of these simple tools used by so many of us who would much rather be crafting or seeing what others have crafted than dealing with techie stuff.  But there are usually workarounds to everything (e.g. you don't really need the Follow button) and we'll keep figuring it out together!




Don't read below this line unless you are having problems - it will only be confusing!!
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ETA: I've gotten a few e-mail questions already this morning and that's fine - if I can help, I would love to - but know that I'm a crafty person, not techie - I just happen to like tracking down problems!!  The bigger problem is that I'm leaving for the weekend and will only have my iPad along so won't be able to research things very well.  If I do have any updates based on problems I'm hearing about - I'm going to try to post them right here with updates to this post instead of doing a whole bunch of new posts.

1. A new Feedly user is getting a blank screen when trying to bring up Feedly.  Feedly posted this about people using the Chrome browser:

If you try to load http://cloud.feedly.com from a desktop browser and you get a blank page, it is most likely because a proxy is blocking it or one of your extensions is blocking it. Please go to chrome://extensions and temporarily disable and re-enable your extensions.

I actually had this blank screen happen recently when I was paying a college tuition bill - so this is Chrome specific, not Feedly specific. It's like Chrome is a little too aggresive about stopping things!!? Click on the three little lines in the upper right corner of your Chrome browser. Then click on Tools and Extensions.  After that, I don't what you are going to see because it entirely depends on what you have loaded on your PC - hopefully feedly's words above will give you some guidance about disabling and re-enabling!!

2. Using Internet Explorer.  Originally feedly didn't work at all on IE - I actually switched to Google Chrome just because of feedly, but I have to tell you that I have come to love Chrome.  However, feedly recently posted this - if anybody does it this way, let us know what you think -

We added a pure web access to feedly. You can point any browser tohttp://cloud.feedly.com and load your feedly. Including IE and Opera.