Google Reader will stop working on 1st July 2013 so in the last few months a lot of people have been looking for an alternative.
Lots have found a new home over at Bloglovin’
If you own a blog you need to go claim it and make sure your feed is working so that posts (and images) are showing. And then make sure you have a link on your blog that people can click to find you over there.
First of all sign up for an account, then click on the My Blog (click on the white heart image top right) then click the left blue Claim Blog.
Search for your blog with the whole domain, if you ahve a RSS feed then it should appear. If you can’t find it then check here to make sure your feed is working.
Once you have found your blog click on it and box will come up with some code.
Now you have 3 choices of where to put the code.
You can either do as advised and add it to a new blog post and publish, but this won’t actually work unless you have an older style blog where a full post is published on the home page. If you do then you can go ahead and do that.
If not then you can use a plugin like all-in-one webmaster on WordPress to put the code in the Header section extra HTML box. (you can remove it after you have verified the blog)
Once the code appears on your home page (it will say Follow my blog on Bloglovin) you can click on the blue Claim Blog on Bloglovin
Once you have added your blog you can click on the edit blog info and choose a category and update the thumbnail image.
An issue I have found with many WordPress self hosted blog is that images are not added to the feed even if your blog post has a featured image.
2 options for this
First of all choose the ‘Full Text‘ option in your WordPress dashboard in Settings – Reading – For each article in a feed show.
And if that doesn’t solve it try adding this plugin to make sure your RSS feed has the image from your featured image in it.
Once you have got your account set up, you need to add a badge on your blog to let people easily follow you on Bloglovin’
You can get some ready made ones here from bloglovin, or I have started adding bloglovin icons to my sets. Currently the silver and purple glitter sparkle sets have them included and I will add more soon.
Let me know if there are a particular colour or style you would like added.
To learn how to add a badge to your widget area see here
thank you! Very useful.
I’m scared to try this for fear all my readers will receive a new post notification with the bloglovin code on it. Does the code actually appear on the blog once you hit publish? Thanks!
See this bit “If not then you can use a plugin like all-in-one webmaster on WordPress to put the code in the Header section extra HTML box. (you can remove it after you have verified the blog)”
Hope that helps 🙂
Thank you – sorted!! 🙂
Thank you for this!
Thanks for explaining the RSS feature picture portion — I’m installing the plugin and hope it works now!
Just wanted to say that the RSS plugin you recommended saved me. Images were suddenly not showing up on BLoglovin’. Thanks for the tip. Very helpful!
OMG thanks for creating this post! I’ve been trying to figure out how to get my images to upload on bloglovin! They should really consider having tutorials for this! Thanks again, totally following your blog. XO 🙂
I have a privately hosted blog but am having some trouble seeing any photos on my bloglovin’ page. I read your fantastic advice and it seems to have worked for wordpress users. When my RSS feed loads to bloglovin’, photos are not attached to my posts (or at least we can not see them). I have assured that my RSS feed is validated and I have claimed my blog. Each article (on my blog website) has its own individual photo. I would like for each article’s photo (on bloglovin’) to be seen as well.
IF the plugin I had in the article didn’t work, try this one instead https://wordpress.org/plugins/featured-images-for-rss-feeds/
Thanks so much for the comment about the “Full Text” setting, I was having to email Bloglovin every week or so to get images added.