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Google Friend Connect Goes Live

A few days ago I got an email from Google telling me that I had been whitelisted to use Google Friend Connect. I took a glance at the Friend Connect pages, fooled around with it a little bit, but I didn’t yet put any widgets on my site. Then, yesterday the Official Google Blog announced that Friend Connect is now available (the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog announced it as well). Yesterday, Bwana made a nice write up on three ways to utilize Google Friend Connect, so I decided to go ahead and put it up on GeekLad.

I went ahead and put up two Friend Connect gadgets: the member gadget and the wall gadget. The member gadget allows folks to join your community and make use of other widgets. Unless you allow anonymous posting on your wall, people will need a way to join you. I decided to put up a seperate page for my wall, just as Is This Stupid? did in setting up the reader wall there.

Initially I was running into problems when I tried to put the wall on a separate page. The WordPress post-processing was messing up the JavaScript code for the wall gadget and it was driving me insane! Unfortunately, by default WordPress has no mechanism for preventing the post-processing of pages and posts. Ergo the Raw HTML Plugin for WordPress. Once I installed the plugin, I just placed the JavaScript code for the Friend Connect wall gadget between

<!--start_raw-->
and
<!--end_raw-->

tags. Then the gadget worked just fine. You may have pulled out all your hair if you’ve ever tried to place bookmarklets or other JavaScript code directly into WordPress posts and pages. I don’t know what to tell you about your hair, but at least you can have your sanity back with the Raw HTML Plugin.  Plus you’ll be able to set up a whole separate page for your wall.

Right now Michael Fruchter is the only one that has joined my community. Hopefully after this post he and I will have some company. 😀 If you do join my community, please feel free to stop by my wall and say hello.  If you start making use of Friend Connect communities on other websites, you’ll probably want to update your Google profile as Chris Brogan has suggested. You can update your profile here.

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