Jetpack

Just a quick post covering the G+ sharing in Jetpack publicize settings, but it caught me out at the weekend, so I thought I’d share in case anyone else has done the same thing.

When you set up Jetpack publicize you can connect a number of different networks, including Google+. I’d done this for my new photography blog, hosted on wordpress.com. (You find this setting under Settings>Sharing there.) And then I noticed that when the posts were being shared, they were marked private, and were going to a limited audience.

It turned out that when I’d set it up, I’d left it at the default G+ setting, which was My circles, instead of opting for Public.

So in this screen:

I hadn’t gone into the dropdown alongside where it said my circles and changed it. I disconnected, and reconnected, and this time made sure I went for public.

There can be reasons for sharing just to your circles on G+ but when you’re auto sharing, you probably do want it to go as wide as it can. Plus if a post is shared to circles and someone goes to reshare, they will get a warning about limited audiences, which might put them off. Personally, I’m going for sharing as widely as I can on that auto share, if I want to fine tune, I can do that when I share manually.

Hope that’s a helpful tip for you, if it is, please share it on!

Yesterday I posted about adding sharing and following options to this blog, and the solution I settled on was Jetpack.

I’m not 100% happy with the sharing buttons. It appears that you can’t customise the tweet that goes out without ~~hacking~~ adjusting the code yourself, and while I’m perfectly capable of getting down and dirty with php, I really don’t want to have to. Also I’m not about to be going round recommending to my lovely readers that they do that – there are all sorts of problems inherent in wading into core files, not least that whatever you have working now, might not next time you upgrade. And that’s if you don’t do anything horrid to your install in the first place 😉

So, jury is out on the sharing options. But what I did need was a box in the sidebar that allowed people to subscribe, and in the mahoosive page of options within the jetpack configuration, there was one labelled extra sidebar widgets that promised just that.

So I clicked on that option,

went into the page and added the widget.

I also discovered while wandering around the options, that I sent out an email yesterday with the greeting howdy at the top of it. I do apologise for that, Nickie. So, further hints and tips when you are using Jetpack to offer email subscription, go into Settings>Reading and customise the email that is sent out. Unless you’re happy saying Howdy to people. Maybe you are.

And as all of that still only took about 5 minutes, rather than the 10 I’m limiting these posts too, I went for broke and added a facebook page widget. As I’m currently the only person liking the page, it’s a bit embarrassing and I may take it off. Can’t quite decide whether I want the twitter feed there. Hm.

Thoughts?

I’d be really grateful if anyone who finds these posts useful would let me know with a quick tweet or a comment. And if you don’t find them useful but there’s something else I could be helping you with, let me know about that too.