This is a late follow-up to last month’s mini-Bloggiesta. I devoted the Bloggiesta to figuring out Google authorship, but never quite managed to pull the trigger on the final step to link my blog to my Google+ profile.

new Google+ button

I decided what worked best for both my blog and for how Google wants to see things was to add a Google+ button to the “follow” icons in my sidebar. In my self-hosted WordPress dashboard, I can add this using the Widget functionality under the Appearance section. The code is slightly different from the code that worked for my other follow buttons because I want to get in the special rel=author tag that tells Google that the author of this blog is the same Joy Weese Moll who has this profile on Google Plus. The code is described in Option 2 on this page from Google. The one thing that confused me is that my Google Plus profile is no longer a number, but I put the +JoyWeeseMoll in where the profile number is shown and that seemed to work.

Goodread

As I suspected, adding another button turned out to be a bigger project than it sounded. I already had 4 buttons filling the width of my sidebar. Adding a 5th on a line by itself would have looked funny. I decided to add a Goodreads icon and to replace the functions “subscribe by email” and “follow me on bloglovin” with buttons, so now I have 2 lines with 4 buttons each.

Things played out in a That’s Good! That’s Bad! format. Fortunately, my original source for social media icons (Free Social Media Icons for Bloggers at Carrie Loves) had updated collections so I was able to get all the buttons that I needed. Unfortunately, the new icons were a slightly different size so I needed to update all of my original buttons. Fortunately, I like the new button styles better so I’m happier with the look overall now that I completed it.

To test if I got my Google+ authorship working, I pasted my website URL into the Structured Data Testing Tool. In the block labeled “Authorship Testing Result,” a green line of text says “Authorship is working for this webpage.” Woohoo! It’s always nice to see such a definitive result to a project.

My sidebar looks good on my screen. Does it look good on yours? Thanks for any input!