Adding external blogs to WordPress Reader & Bloglovin’

Last week, I got a lovely comment from a reader of my previous blog, who had missed moving along on my move firstly to self-hosted, and then on to this new identity, and was wondering where I’d disappeared to. She mentioned she was glad to find me but self-hosted was frustrating as she liked to follow blogs in the wordpress reader. I knew I’d followed self-hosted and non-WP blogs previously, so I did some digging and we got it sorted.

This was one of my biggest worries shifting to self-hosted and then changing names – losing my lovely followers. I also know how annoying it can be to not be able to follow your favourite blogs in your preferred ways, so I wanted to do a post on how to add non-wordpress-dot-com blogs to the WordPress reader. While I was going, I thought I would also share the same for Bloglovin’, after being told a couple of times that people like to read that way, and how as a blogger I should be using it and claiming my blog and adding buttons. I use feedly as my blog reader of choice (I tried bloglovin’ a while back and at that point it was excerpts only, with a click through required for a whole post, so I chose feedly instead), so adding another blog reader account to my list of “things” wasn’t high on my priority list.

To add a blog to Bloglovin’ when they don’t have a follow button on their site:

In the menu you get when you click on your profile photo (see how rarely I use my account? It’s still under my old identity), there is the option “edit blogs you follow”.

Then it’s just just a matter of clocking the “add blog” button on the left, and adding in the blog address you want to follow.

That will give you a screen of options (if you searched by name rather than URL ), and then it’s just a meter of clicking the blog you want.

And there it is!

To add an external blog to the wordpress dot com reader:

Select the reader option from the top left corner, and then you will see a screen like below. Next to the “blogs I follow” is a little wheel – click on that.

Then enter the URL of the blog you want to follow, and it will be added to the list of blogs in your reader.

This is also the screen where you can adjust your following settings and change how often you get emails from wordpress about new posts.

It’s that simple!

Now, tell me. Am I the last blogger not using bloglovin’? Sell me on it, what am I missing, beyond a feed reader?