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Not All Followers Will Provide A Link To Their Profile

I've described several oddities about how you can Follow a blog.

There's the different account hosts that you can use, the different profiles that you can use, and (in some cases) whether to display an individual blog in the list of Followed blogs for the profile used, or even to allow access to the profile used.

There's a lot of choices there, and not everybody understands all of the implications for the combinations of choices.

Look at any blog, with more than a couple dozen Followers.

Take a look at the Following community for any blog with any interesting number of Followers. Let's use my Following Test blog, in this case.

Look at the first named icon, in the gadget for my blog - see my icon? Watch the popup when you hover the mouse over my icon, and you'll see my name, "Chuck". Click on my icon, and look at the profile displayed.

"Chuck" is a profile name, attached to a Blogger profile.

The profile name "Chuck" is blue, because "Chuck" is a link caption. The target of the link is my Blogger profile, because I am Following that blog, using my Blogger profile. If I was Following the blog using my Google profile, the target of the link would be my Google profile.

Not all Followers profiles, displayed in the Followers gadget, provide a link to a profile. Go back to the Followers icons, for my blog, and go two rows up from my profile "Chuck".

"nitecruzr" is a profile name, attached to a default Following profile.

Look for the giraffe, with a popup of "nitecruzr". Click on that icon, and look at the profile displayed. The profile name is, of course, "nitecruzr" - but the profile name here is black, because "nitecruzr" is not a link caption. I Followed my blog as "nitecruzr" using my default Following profile.

When you Follow a blog without linking an external profile, you use a default Following profile. You can edit your Following profile using the Settings wizard. If you see "Already have a profile on the web? Use it instead", you are Following using the default Following profile.

The default Following profile gives a non clickable profile name.

If you use your default Following profile to Follow a blog, your Followers display will not link to your Blogger or Google profile, and the profile name won't be clickable. You'll have a few basic settings to make there, in the Settings wizard, and that's it.

So, when you look at a Follower, and the profile name isn't clickable, that's probably because the person Following is using the default profile, for that blog. That's his or her right.

Comments

Jane Elliott said…
anytime I follow, I want it to be a link to my blog, show my blogger pic, etc. I have found that this is not always the case

it used to automatically be like that as long as you were signed in. To many choices now!

below I am choosing my google profile for my comment, it doesn't even show an option to comment as "blogger"
Nitecruzr said…
Storm,

Yes, there are a lot of choices. Some choices are necessary, to satisfy peoples desire for anonymity / privacy, others for other reasons, valid or not. Maybe we could discuss your actual needs, if you can start a discussion in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken.
Paula said…
This is great info, because this is what I'm experiencing now. I sign on to my blogger profile, but when I then "follow" a blog, the default silhouette and my real name show up on the blog, instead of my blogger profile photo and display name.

How do I change it?
Please HELP!
TIA
**** said…
Why isn't there an answer to this question? I have been all over the Internet!
Carley Cooper said…
I am so confused about this. If I understand correctly from reading your articles, when I sign up for a gmail email, I'm not just setting up one account? Some how, some where I have ended up with more than one account and more than one place with settings. How do I find each of these places where there are settings? Where do I find this thing you call a settings wizard? I have a gmail and a blogger account. When I follow someone's blog my real names shows instead of my blog name. I want my blog name to show. Right now, everything I can find I have typed in Worship Melodies as my name, yet when I follow someone's blog my real name shows. My gmail settings I have set to Worship Melodies as my name, and in my blogger settings. Where do I find something else that I need to change? I'm sorry for rambling on.

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