Hi! I really like your “Follow Me” widget on your sidebar. My question is: How do you get it to display your follower count? Particularly for Goodreads as I’ve never seen it for that social network before, only Facebook and Twitter. If you could share how you set that up I would be really grateful as I’d love to display Goodreads follower information on my book blog too.
Thanks!
Julia
Hi Julia! Thanks so much!
In order to get the follower numbers from Goodreads, you have to use their API. It takes a fair bit of PHP coding knowledge to get it working though. APIs still kind of haven’t clicked for me, so my boyfriend did help me set up that part.
If you’re not comfortable doing coding yourself, then you can check out the Ultimate Book Blogger Plugin. I have included the same “Follow Me” widget I use in that plugin. It’s super easy to set up and many of the follower methods update automatically, including:
- Goodreads
- YouTube
- Bloglovin’
- BookLikes
The others you have to update manually though due to lack of APIs or no other good way to fetch the numbers.
Eventually I would like to sell an additional plugin that only has that social media widget (for people who don’t also want/need the full UBB Plugin), but I haven’t gotten around to it yet!
I hope this helps!
I am so using that plugin when I switch over. I love it.
Question: I’ve always wondered if it’s possible to combine GR stats for blogs that have co-bloggers?
No :/ I’m not sure how I’d go about that because it would be quite complicated.
What if you had the data pulling separately on the back end and just had the plugin tally the numbers up for display on the front end?
Well technically it can be done. The complicated part isn’t tallying the numbers, it’s dealing with 2 or more sets of usernames.
And I just don’t think I want to add up the numbers. I think it’s a bit misleading.
Yea we have the same issue, we need to display multiple Twitters and Goodreads. I hope someone comes up with a way.
I might come up with a way that allows you to add separate widgets for each person, but I won’t do a way that actually combines the numbers in one widget.
That would actually be really cool ) I would prefer that to a combined count anyway. They are separate accounts after all. Whatever you end up coming up with, we think you’re brilliant 🙂
I use this and love it! Which you know since I had to bug you a million times for help. lol It’s exactly what I wanted. I’m glad you had this on the UBBP. 🙂
Wow, thanks for answering my question so fast! I will definitely look into the API and see if it’s something I can manage, otherwise the Book Blogger Plugin sounds like an awesome purchase.
Julia
I Like 😛