If you’re using Google Buzz, you might want to link your blog to your Buzz account; doing so will let you automatically share new blog posts over at Buzz. For some people this will be almost automatic; just click on “Connected Sites” and your blog will be there.
But for the rest of us, here’s a step by step tutorial on connecting the two.
In the header of your blog, place a link that looks like this:
<link rel=”me” type=”text/html” href=”http://www.google.com/profiles/{your_username}”/>
For most blogging platforms you can do this by tweaking your template or theme. For WordPress specifically, while in the Admin Control Panel click Editor under Appearance in the left nav. On the right side, look under Templates for a Header file; that most likely will be the file you want to edit. (I’m honestly not sure how consistent file naming conventions are across WordPress themes; you might have to poke around until you find the file with the <head> section.) Add the new line under the existing <link rel=”me” lines then click Update File. Back on your blog’s display side of things, do a Shift-refresh and then view the source for the page and make sure our changes are there.
Hopefully that’s enough to get you going; if not you can search Google for how-to articles on modifying the themes or templates of whatever platform you are using.
You can find more details on this step in Google’s dev guide but obviously you want to replace {your_username} with your actual Buzz profile username.
[Update for WordPress bloggers!: Here’s an even easier way to get this link in your blog. Assuming your blog has some kind of links section powered by WordPress itself, you can link to your Google Profile page via a WordPress link. In the Control Panel, click Links, Add New, give it whatever name you like, put the link to your Profile as the Web Address, and then down under Link Relationship check the “identity” checkbox (“another web address of mine”). Click Add Link to safe it and, assuming the link to your Google profile is showing on the homepage of your blog now, you should be done.]
Now head to your Google profile. You can get there by clicking your own name in Buzz and on the Google Profile link on the resulting page. Now click Edit Profile and scroll down to the bottom of the page to the Links section. Add your blog as a custom link. It should pop up under My Links.
Now here’s the step I kept missing. Click the Edit button next to the link you just added and check the “This is a profile page about me” checkbox. If you don’t do this, Google won’t connect your blog! Here is Google’s documentation about this option.
Now you can either wait for Google to re-crawl your site, of if you’re in a hurry, go to the Social Graphs API page, log in with your Google account, and click the Recrawl button for the link you just added.
Finally go back to Buzz, to Connected Sites and your blog should now be there as an option. Click Add and then Save and you’re done.
At least in theory. If this blog post shows up in my Buzz-stream then it worked!
Thanks for the guide, followed the steps and will just have to see what happens next…will keep my eyes open and see if this entry turns up or not. 🙂
It looks like this one hasn’t shown up but the last one did. At least I think that’s a direct feed link in my buzz stream.
So I’m hoping it’s just a matter of it taking some time before it’ll respider here, since I forced a crawl when I set everything up.
Strange, I can link my blog to Buzz and I never had to do this. I’m wondering if it’s either because I already linked it to OpenID or if it’s because I hooked it to Google Web Master Tools.
I also took my RSS feed off Buzz… seems like information overkill. What do you think?
Angela didn’t have to do any of this either; her blog was just there (self-hosted WordPress blog) and I’m not sure what’s different about her situation. I’ll ask her if she’s using Google Web Master Tools though…that might be why. It’d make sense.
You mean your RSS feed of other stuff you read? I have my shared Google Reader items going to Buzz but I try to be selective about what I share so I don’t spam Buzz too much. I think it’ll take a while before we all figure out ‘happy mediums.’