Not on Blogger? See more resources for alternatives, or learn about Google Friend Connect.

Have you see one of the most popular new widgets/gadgets on Blogger blogs lately? They’re popping up all over: Followers. A grid of user pictures in the sidebar of popular blogs, showing off the wonderful mix of people that this blogger attracts:

So what’s this all about?

What’s Following?

Following is a lot like subscribing using RSS. When your visitors “follow” your blog, they get updates from your blog (and all the other ones they follow) in a centralized location—this time, though, instead of Google Reader or Bloglines, it’s their Blogger Dashboard:

How Do I Follow?

To follow your favorite blogs, click on the Follow button on their sidebar widget. You then get to choose what account to use to follow the blog—Google, Yahoo, AIM, Open ID or Netlog. (Google includes your Blogger account.)

Once you’ve signed in, Blogger gives you the option of following the blog publicly or privately.

Either way, you get to read updates on your dashboard, but if you don’t want this site added to your Blogger/Google profile, select Private. Note that Following a blog might also result in it being added to your Google Reader. Hasn’t happened to me, but I’ve heard reports.

Why Do I Want Followers?

You want followers for the same reason you want subscribers—it grows your audience. (If you don’t want that, that’s okay, too, of course.) Blogger Help explains this well:

The Followers widget is a great tool to help you grow your blog’s audience. Readers often visit a blog and enjoy it but fail to return. With the followers widget you can get all readers to return and become a fan.

You can also use a Followers widget to better connect with your readers—to see who they are and to find and comment on their blogs, even if they’ve never commented on yours.

How Do I Get Followers?

First things first, you have to add the Followers gadget. This is available primarily to Blogger blogs, but if you run a blog on your own hosting, you can also add the widget if you sign up for Google Friend Connect.

To add the gadget in Blogger, go to Layout > Page Elements (the default tab under Layout). Choose where you want the Followers box—your sidebar, your footer, whatever:

Click on “Add a Gadget” in your desired place. A window with a list of choices pops up. Right now, Followers is #1:

After you click the plus button to the right of Followers, you’re given options to give the Followers box a title (in my above example, from Literary Agent Nathan Bransford‘s blog, the title is “Friends of the Blog”) and to customize the colors to match your layout:

Once you’ve added the Followers gadget, you’ll want to encourage your readers to follow your blog. Again, Blogger Help has some good advice here:

• Write a post about your followers widget.

• Encourage all readers to become a follower [Well, unless you're a grammarian. Then you'll encourage all your readers to become followers, because I don't think it's very healthy for all your readers to become just one follower ].
• Put your followers widget at the top of your sidebar so more readers will notice it.
• Many readers ignore sidebar items so by writing a post about your followers widget and moving the widget to the top of your sidebar, you will inevitably grow your audience.

The best way to encourage people to follow your blog is to have awesome content—something they’ll want to come back and read again.

If you aren’t on Blogger, you can still get Followers. You can enroll your site in Google Friend Connect, but that will take a little technical work. If you’re on Facebook, you can try the NetworkedBlogs app.

You can also learn more about attracting readers with RSS and getting your visitors to stay and subscribe. I’ve written a free guide to increasing your blog’s stickiness, “Get Your Visitors to Stick!”

Good luck garnering Followers!
More WFMW

But he did a lot better with understanding the actual potty training. I saw this book in the library and although I was skeptical, I picked up Toilet Training in Less Than A Day. It took about two hours to read, and it still sounded too good to be true.

So with a grain of salt, we sat down in the kitchen to learn about this potty train. Following the procedures of the book, Hayden taught a doll how to go potty, answered endless quizzes on potty procedures, regularly spent 10 minutes on his potty, and checked to see if his pants were wet.

And, um, it worked. He didn’t even really have an accident that first day, though it did take three hours before he went to the bathroom the first time, no matter how much drink I forced down his throat.

And then there was the next day. No accidents. And none the next day. And other than one bedwetting incident, no accidents the next week. This week, we’ve had one bed wetting incident.

Hayden now knows how to use his little potty, empty it into the big potty, flush, replace the bowl and wash his hands all by himself (though he does seem to like an audience still). When he’s in nursery or day care at the gym, he knows to ask his teachers for help. He still needs a little help with wiping, and we have to turn the light on for him (and really, he does like an audience), but often I don’t even know he’s gone until he shouts, “Mommy, I peed!”

So yeah. I can’t promise Toilet Training in Less Than A Day will work for everyone, but much to my surprise, it worked for us!

More WFMW

No, wait. Getting toddlers to eat . . . their food. Riiight. (Note: cannibalism is frowned upon in most societies.)

We’ve talked about getting children to eat their vegetables before, but sometimes it’s tough to get my 2-year-old to eat . . . anything.

What’s your best advice?

More WFMW

“YES!” he said without hesitation.

I don’t think so, though. He eats a wide variety of foods: the standard toddler fare of peanut butter, bananas, graham crackers, fruit other than bananas, yogurt, bread, milk, juice, desserts, pizza, cheese, TUNA!!! (which has become a family joke), green beans, black beans, corn, etc. He doesn’t care what color his food is, he doesn’t care if it’s touching one another and while he does love his “yunt” (lunch, meaning sandwich, usually peanut butter), he’s not fixated on one single food.

There are, of course, things that he won’t eat: French fries (although sometimes the ketchup will overpower his defenses), chicken nuggets, most other kinds of meat, vegetables other than the ones I mentioned, and almost anything served at dinner (other than TUNA!!!).

Today, I’ll just focus on the vegetables—what can we do to get our kids to eat more vegetables (or is this one of “those” battles?)

• Offer the food repeatedly (without high expectations). Some people say it takes as many as 16 (no, not 16,000) interactions with a food for children to try it. Hopefully these do not all come at one sitting; that seems a little excessive, yes?
• Let them see you eat it. You’re the best example for your children. Hayden won’t eat pepperoni, even though his father does, because he’s seen me pick it off my pizza too many times. This isn’t always mandatory of course—for the most part, Hayden has not yet picked up on what foods I don’t eat. I was 22 when I realized my mother didn’t eat peas. I love peas!
• Have veggies ready and available for snacks (and often nothing else). Also helpful here: let them use ranch dressing, or another dressing they like. Ketchup, if you must (hey, isn’t that a vegetable? ).
• Fill half a child’s plate with veggies. Another quarter should be meat and the last quarter, starch. Quick and easy guide to balancing your meals.
• Serve veggies “family-style,” leave the rest in the kitchen. When sitting down to dinner, only bring the platters/bowls of vegetables to the table. Leave starches and meats in the kitchen—if you really want more of those, you’ll have to go get them, but if you or your children are just hungry after finishing your first plate, the vegetables are the only convenient choice.
• Play games. My mother would play that our thin-cut green beans were worms and we were baby birds. I love green beans (though the thin-cut ones are just a bit slimy for my taste ). Another favorite: your child (this one’s usually better for boys) is a dinosaur and he’s going to eat the trees (broccoli).
• Hide them if you have to. Zucchini banana bread, anyone? (Nope, me neither.)
• A caveat: Don’t bargain, especially not for ‘better’ foods. Apparently, psychologists say that bargaining with your children (“Eat two more bites of peas or no dessert!”) just reinforces the notion that the food they’re averse to is disgusting, worse than the desired food and something to be endured.

And I can’t talk about eating habits without mentioning an awesome book on the subject, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink. Some of these tips come right from his book.

I found this book really entertaining—and pretty shocking. He looks at our hidden motivations for eating, factors that influence us in eating—and strategies for being more aware of what we eat (or just tricking ourselves into eating less!).

But obviously, I’m no expert in getting your children to eat their veggies. What’s worked for you?

Part of Works-for-me Wednesday.

Table of contents for Blog comments

• Four Ways to Encourage Comments on Your Blog
• Protect Your Blog with a Comment Policy
• Subscribe to comments to follow blog conversations
• You have spoken . . . about speaking
• Handling negative comments
• Handling negative comments part II

I haven’t had to do this on here very often, but pretty regularly on my work blog, I have people comment who are . . . well . . . less than nice, we’ll say (or just wrong). While sometimes it’s pretty easy to handle comments I don’t really appreciate over there (often with more facts to back up my story), it’s a lot harder to do that in the realm of mom blogging.

If you’re posting about how cute your kids are or how you’re struggling with this behavior or how you’ve come to a self-discovery, it’s more than just annoying to have someone contradict you or treat you unkindly. It’s a bit of a personal affront—sometimes even an attack on your children or your parenting!

There are a few ways you can handle this. The best ways (the ways you would tell your children to handle this):

1. Ignore it. If you’re really lucky, your bloggy friends will even come to your defense. Just the other day, I saw a friend of mine share a personal story and someone called her out for being unchristlike. I was the first person there after that comment was left, and I vehemently (but hopefully respectfully) disagreed. Several subsequent commenters did the same.
2. Settle it privately. If your blogging platform allows, email the person directly. You could explain that, while you don’t particularly appreciate the way that they’ve phrased their concerns, you’d like to know if there’s something you could do better in your blogging (or parenting, if you’re really feeling generous) in the future.
3. Use concrete facts. If the person is disagreeing with a factual assertion (instead of just your opinion), you can provide more information on the facts you’re citing, such as their sources.
4. Point to your blog comment policy. If you’ve already written one, and this comment violates the guidelines you’ve set forth, inform the commenter privately (via email) or publicly (via the comments on that post). Take whatever action you say you will in your policy (deleting the comment, banning the commenter, etc.)

Possibly less productive:

5. Call them out. In the very next comment you make, point out that they’ve been unkind, that that kind of behavior would be unacceptable from your children, and it’s unacceptable on your blog.

Downright counterproductive:

6. Tit for tat. Reflect everything they’ve said back on them in your next comment or, worse yet, track down their blog and make a similar comment.

There are a few other solutions that I’m not sure what category to put them in:

7. Play the martyr. Face it, we’re moms: we can do this with the best of them. As we should all remember from being children, guilt trips and the martyr card don’t really solve anything though.
8. Delete it. If your comment policy says you’ll delete abusive comments, or negative comments, do it. If you don’t have a comment policy, the general bloggy community shuns deleting comments just because they disagree with you. However, on a personal blog—it’s your blog.
9. Block that commenter. Depending on the nature of the comment, it may take only one comment to warrant blocking them, especially if it’s in your comment policy. Even if it’s not, it’s your blog, your family and you. Protect them if you feel you need to.

What do you do when you receive a negative comment? What has worked for you? What hasn’t?

More WFMW.

Table of contents for Blogging Add-ons

• Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Bloggers
• Five Ways to Win Links—and Technorati’s Heart
• 5 Steps to Getting Started with FeedBurner
• Seven Ways to Master FeedBurner
• Blog Carnivals, Start to Finish
• Get even more out of FeedBurner

About Technorati
Technorati is a blog search engine. It tracks tags and categories on blog posts, links to a blog, and your “Technorati authority.” You can use Technorati to find posts on relevant topics, track how many blogs are linking to you, or give yourself a little self esteem boost (if your ranking is high). For now at least, Technorati’s tag index pages are also appearing in Google results, so it really pays to have your posts on those pages!

Michelle at Scribbit has some great information on Technorati (Ten Technorati Tips and the Biggest Technorati Tip in the World), but with Technorati’s total redesign a couple months ago, a few things have changed. Michelle’s excellent tips on how to join Technorati, how to add tags to your post and why Technorati matters are still completely accurate. However, Technorati has changed the way they display their information, trying to encompass more than just blogs.

One of the changes is that they no longer list the number of blogs linking in, number of links and authority numbers separately. Your Technorati Authority is the number of different blogs that link back to yours. Your Technorati Rank is based on your authority. UPDATE (Oct 2009): Technorati now uses a scale of 1-1000 to indicate authority, rather than a direct number of blogs linking in.

Most of the growth in these areas comes naturally, albeit slowly. There are a few things you can do to improve your Technorati authority yourself (without opening up fiftybillion mini blogs to link to your real one). Now for . . .

Five Ways to Create Links & Win Technorati’s Heart
Making your own links is almost better than having other people link to you. If you have the opportunity to submit your link (like you do with the last three, and may with the others as well), you can write the text for your link. Whatever the title of your post is, your link on someone else’s blog will say that. Having a good link text can help your page rank for those words in search engines!

So, how do you make your own links on other peoples’ blogs?

1. Commenting. This one can pay off in a number of ways:
   • Become a regular commenter who adds value to blogs in your niche.
   • Even if your link won’t count for search engines because of a “nofollow” tag, if you have a post on your blog that’s relevant to the topic of that post, share your link. Of course, don’t just drop it in a comment and leave; read the article, comment on its contents and explain how your post was related. The author of the blog might link to you or other readers of the blog might visit you and later link to you.
   • If you comment on a “Dofollow” blog (one that hasn’t linked to you in the last six months), it should count as a point on your Technorati Authority automatically. Always add value to the conversation when you comment!
2. Create a network of blogging friends. Reach out to people who blog in your niche (hi, blogging friends!) and build relationships with them. Sometimes, they’ll start reading your blog on their own (and linking to it on their own), and sometimes, you’ll be able to ask them to link to a post that’s very entertaining or linkable, or one that you know they’d like.
3. Participate in blog carnivals. One of my favorites is the Carnival of Family Life, created by Kailani.
4. Participate in contests including things like Scribbit’s Write-Away Contest.
5. Participate in projects that will give you links, such as my Group Writing Project.

Speaking of my Group Writing Project—next week is the July Group Writing Project. Spread the word—this is one we’ll all benefit from!

Get more tips of all kinds from this week’s Works-for-Me-Wednesday!

Table of contents for Blogging success

• Increase Your Blog’s Stickiness
• Setting goals for your blog
• Get the most out of guest blogging
• 7 Ways to Brand Your Blog
• Blogging Q&A: Can a blog be meaningful and successful?

“Stickiness” on a blog (or website) is getting visitors to stay longer, read more, subscribe and leave comments. Now, isn’t that something we all want?

So today, three tips that I’ve heard only about a billion times to help increase your blog’s stickiness:

1. Link to related posts. I know with WordPress there’s a way to do this automatically (with a plugin), but even if you have to do it manually, it’s worth it. Before posting, brainstorm posts on similar topics. You can also look through labels or categories in your archives to see if there’s something related. At the end of your post, list a few (three is a good number) of these related posts. If someone has read that far, chances are they’ll want to read more stuff just like it!
2. Make it easy to find similar posts. As with above, if someone is reading your site, chances are they’re interested in what you’re saying. Use some sort of categorization and/or tagging system (categories, tags, labels, etc.) to help them find similar posts on your blog. If applicable, list your categories/tags/labels in the sidebar to help people explore your blog.
3. Tell visitors what to do. You want your visitors to subscribe to your blog or comment? Tell them! At the end of every entry, invite readers to subscribe to your feed (code the invitation into your template!). Ask for comments; put a subscribe button in a prominent place on your blog. If someone arrives at your site and doesn’t know what to do next, they’ll probably leave instead of hunting for something to do on your site.

Would you like to know more about developing your blog’s stickiness? I’ve written a free guide to increasing your blog’s stickiness, “Get Your Visitors to Stick!”

A Toddler Bedtime Routine

Here’s what our bedtime routine looks like today:

1. Shallow bath in the big tub. Brush teeth. Soap and washing twice a week. (Usually, this one is mostly done by Daddy)
2. Dry off, put on diaper and onesie.
3. At this point, Hayden stands up and knows what’s next. He grins, giggles and runs across the room to where his rocking chair waits.
4. After he climbs into his rocking chair, Daddy reads him a story (or a few pages) while Mommy puts on his socks. (Lately he doesn’t want to stay in his chair. He sits on my lap while Ryan reads.)
5. Daddy says good night, turns off the light, shuts the door and turns on the fan (white noise) in the hallway.
6. Mommy gives Marty to Hayden (unless he got him during his story, which happens a lot), cradles him in her arms and maybe wraps him in a blanket.
7. Mommy sings “Baby Beluga,” usually with made up words about Hayden. After a verse or two, Mommy gives Hayden a kiss and lays him down in his crib.

By now, it’s very rare for Hayden to cry or call out once we put him down. Of course, we’ve refined this routine for our family over the last year. See also the followup with more bedtime routine tips.

An Evolving Bedtime Routine

Over time, your child’s needs change. Once I stopped nursing Hayden to sleep, his night time bedtime routine looked like this:

1. Nurse
2. Bath in warm soapy water
3. Towel off and rub lotion on dry areas (feet, hands, elbows, calves).
4. Put on diaper and pajamas. I discovered that one of the reasons why this drove him nuts before was because at this point he was starving. By moving his feeding up to the beginning of the routine, he was much more agreeable at this point!
5. Hold him, rocking gently and singing 2-3 songs. Put him in bed once he starts sucking his fingers.

Before this, our bedtime routine was even shorter.

Baby’s First Bedtime Routine

Our first bed time routine was very, very basic (he was three months, after all!).

1. Bath in warm soapy water (like this one)
2. Put on diaper and pajamas
3. Nurse him to sleep

Everyone and their mother will tell you not to nurse your baby to sleep, but this worked for us for a long, long time. I don’t really remember the transition being that hard, but it did take a few days.

A Naptime Routine

A naptime routine is a huge help in getting your child to take his or her naps! Our routine is very short:

Turn on the fan. Hold him, rocking gently and singing 2-3 songs (now we’re down to one). Put him in bed once he starts sucking his fingers. (He’s mostly grown out of this by now, but I’ve seen him do it a couple times lately.)

Tips for Creating Your Own Bedtime Routine

• Do what works for you. Baths, books and storytelling, songs and night time rituals are good. I had a sister with a deathly fear of monsters; every night my mom sprayed her room with a “monster spray.”
• Make your children comfortable. Every night for years our family prayed for “no needles in the bed, no throw up” to reassure another sister (who really did find a pin in her bed once, prompting the addition to our prayers).
• If possible, put the most distressing task at the beginning of the routine.
• Go slow and talk softly.
• Use dim lights.
• Involve your spouse in the bedtime routine. That way, if you’re ever called away (or out having fun!) at night, he’ll be able to take over with confidence and minimal disruption to the routine.
• Use repetition. If your children are at the age where they want the same book(s) every night, use it to your advantage. We do things in pretty much the same order and sing the same lullaby every night.
• Once I quit nursing Hayden to sleep, I put him down while he was still awake, but obviously on his way to sleeping. By now, I can put him down after one yawn or eye rub and he’ll go to sleep on his own.
• Use a security object. It took months of us giving it to him every nap and night for Hayden to become attached, but now he really loves Marty, his monkey. He almost seems relieved to see him when he knows it’s time for sleep.

Our bedtime routine has helped Hayden go to bed well for almost anyone (Mom, Dad, Aunties and friends) and, I think, eventually helped him to sleep through the night. I can only hope our future children will benefit from our bed time routines, too!

Good luck creating your own bedtime routines!

See also the followup with more bedtime routine tips.

Ahem, anyway, as I was saying, Google isn’t the only way to find fun websites anymore. In fact, I dare say it’s not the best or even a good way to find a fun website. StumbleUpon is better (much better!). So, here’s StumbleUpon from start to finish!

Using StumbleUpon
Using StumbleUpon is very easy. You do have to go to their site, StumbleUpon.com to join and download their toolbar. They have toolbars for IE and Firefox browsers.

Once you’ve entered your identification info, you get to choose your topics to browse. These include everything from blogs to marketing to parenting to religion to writing to politics and back. Choose well; this will impact how satisfied you are with the results.

Using the Toolbar

Now you’re all ready to go. Click the “Stumble!” button to be taken to a random website recommended in one of your topic areas. If you like the site that comes up, click the thumbs up “I like it!” If you don’t like it, click the thumbs down. If you’re indifferent, feel free to click “Stumble!” again.

The “Send to” button lets you e-mail your favorite pages to StumbleUpon friends (I’ll be your StumbleUpon friend) or other friends. The talk bubble lets you see comments on the current page and make your own.

The Channel options are: (globe) see a page from any of your topics (like the “Stumble!” button), (people) see a page from my friends, (newspaper) show a news item, (pictures) show an image, (movie reel) show a movie (there’s also StumbleVideo for this). The All option at the end lets you choose a single topic of yours to stumble in (ie, if I clicked “All” and chose “Knitting” when I hit “Stumble!” it will show me only knitting pages). You can also search, or visit other stumblers or wikis from the All menu.

Favorites takes you to a “blog” with all of the pages you’ve ‘thumbed’ or rated. Friends shows you your SU friends. Tools lets you sign in or out, change your password, update your options or topics, etc.

Getting onto StumbleUpon
There are two ways to get into SU: natural and paid. You can sign up for the StumbleUpon Paid Inclusion program, buying a certain number of visitors for $0.05 a piece, or you can get added by a StumbleUpon user. Yes, you can add yourself, and as far as I can tell, it’s not shunned as it is on sites like Digg.

To submit a page, click the thumbs up button. If the page has already been submitted, your vote will count as a thumbs up vote. If it hasn’t already been submitted, you get this popup:

Fill in the data and voilá . You are on StumbleUpon.

Doing Well on StumbleUpon
Doing well personally: To “succeed” on StumbleUpon, one of the most important things you can do is to Stumble. A lot. Whenever you come across a site you like, “thumb.” The more sites you rate and submit, the more power and influence you wield. I’ve rated 186 sites, about half of which were original “discoveries” (I accidentally submitted the first 30 something posts from my blog at one point, that’s included in those numbers.) Because I”ve submitted and thumbed plenty of stories, I also have 8 “fans” now, or Stumblers who like the same things as I do. Having a bigger network of friends and fans on StumbleUpon ensures that your sites are seen by more people.

Getting your site to do well: A page’s success depends on several factors. It must be labeled in the best topic and tagged well. My most successful pages on StumbleUpon have brought hundreds of visitors in a day because the people visiting my site gave it a thumbs up. The more thumbs up a page gets, the more people get to see it.

I’ve also written about StumbleUpon at work: Is Your Site StumbleUponAble? and Should You Use Paid Inclusion for StumbleUpon?

Enjoy!

• Work from the top down. Wipe down countertops (or dust other surfaces). Don’t worry about collecting all the stuff from your counters (totally gross), just wipe it right on the floor. Scrub spills if necessary.
• Sweep kitchen floor. Don’t stoop and fiddle with dustpans (I hate those). Sweep right onto a carpeted area.
• Vacuum up all the crumblies.
• It saves me time to use my DustBuster for edging carpets; this probably depends on the ease of using your vacuum cleaner’s tools.

If you’re going to be doing all of those things anyway, may as well save yourself a little time and effort in collecting and carrying all the trash around with you.

Biggest bang for your buck cleaning
For maximum impact, hit these areas first:

• Dishes in the sink. Stick them in the diswasher. I give you permission not to rinse them.
• Clutter on horizontal surfaces. Sigh. A constant battle in my kitchen.
• Stuff in the middle of the floor. Find a place for these things. In my house, this stuff is almost always toys, shoes and newspapers. I try to put these things away before bed; keeps the house cleaner so I can focus on other things if I have to clean in a panic.
• Vacuum. You wouldn’t think that it’s worth it, but a very clean floor makes everything feel tidy.

A little obvious, I know, but one of my biggest problems in “panic cleaning” is focusing on the most important things. I suddenly notice that the table is dusty, and I have to take care of that. I vacuum and realize that the table is dirty. I stop and clear it off and shake the tablecloth out and then start vacuuming again….