WordPress Follow Button

Over night there was a bit of a conversation snippet that came up among the mentors. Ammers from Backlog Crusader mentioned that she had noticed a number of the sites didn’t have the easy to use WordPress Follow button, in spite of being almost all wordpress based sites. The reason behind that is simple, because it is a missing feature if you roll your own blog using WordPress.org software. There is a plugin that is effectively must have software called Jetpack, that adds in a lot of the functionality you get with the managed WordPress, but not quite all of it. I had planned on doing a deep dive into plugins in another post but for now you will need that installed.

Ultimately this had been something I had in my own backlog of things to research. However stuff and things always got in the way and I forgot about it. This morning before sitting down to write the post I decided to figure this out. Truth is it is fairly simple but has a bunch of prerequisites for making it work. As you can see in my sidebar I now have a WordPress Follow button ready to go and we are going to show you how as well. I followed a guide on this blog to verify everything but I will also be walking you through the steps.

1. Install Jetpack and enable the plugin
2. Enable Subscriptions (all 3 sliders) under Jetpack > Settings > Discussions > Subscriptions section
3. Make sure JSON API Is enabled.
   1. Scroll to bottom of Jetpack > Dashboard Screen
   2. Click the Modules Link
   3. Find JSON API and make sure it is enabled

Now that we have verified the prerequisites you can actually generate your button knowing it will work successfully once you have embedded it. On the WordPress Developer site there is a handy tool that generates a button for your site. It gives you a handful of options as seen above. Unfortunately I had to disable the follower count because my sidebar only has so much real estate, and the button doesn’t dynamically adjust to fit the space allowed. Simply fill in your site information and hit generation and it spits out some HTML that we are going to use in the next step.

Now we just need a final resting place for the code. You could of course integrate it directly into your theme if you wanted to go through that effort. Personally I slapped it in a Custom HTML sidebar widget and called it good. Now the truth is this is going to harm page load performance since it violates best practices for the placement of script blocks. That said… it is very hard to use ANY plugins on your site that will not ultimately violate the best practices and strand script blocks in all sorts of inopportune places.

WordPress.com offers a rather good RSS reader, and now you have made it much easier for someone to add your site to it. The truth is I had not been focused on using it as a primary blog reader, in part because I have a premium subscription to Feedly, and do my reading through it. During the great fallout that happened with the death of Google Reader, that just happened to be the product I gravitated towards. WordPress.com however is a site I regularly use because thanks to the Jetpack addon it gives me access to manage all of my wordpress sites in a single dashboard. Definitely worth checking out if you have never done so.