Before, you start wondering what is Google Friend Connect, I suggest you to visit this site. Once, you are through with the knowledge of what is Google Friend Connect, you should be knowing about what Social Bar is. Yes, it’s a widget that can be installed onto your site and then lets you create your own site community without the headache of programming, registering and managing user and all that.

So what you up to this time, eh?

Well, I have created an extension that further eases the installation of this Social Bar. All you have to do is register your site with Google Friend Connect and get yourself a Site ID. After that, once the extension is installed, it will show the Social Bar whenever a full post is served. Combined with the Google’s Commenting feature, your blog will become a breathing community.

The Social Bar

 Comment Widget

Community List

Join/Login

So what does this extension exactly do?

As this extension was created for my personal needs, it may not be totally useful to you and you may not agree with me on how I use Google Friend Connect’s Social Bar. Now that we have an understanding let me tell you what this extension does. This extension inserts the Social Bar code into each post(single post only) served i.e. when you are viewing the full version of the post. Currently, the Social Bar is shown at the bottom of the page because that’s how I like it. As, the Social Bar implements the commenting feature (isolated to the page currently being visited), it eliminates the need of internal commenting system.

How to insall this extension?

• Download the extension from the bottom of this post.
• Extract the GFCSB.cs and upload it to your BlogEngine.Net’s ~/App_Code/Extensions folder. If your blog isn’t hosted on root, please change the path as needed.
• Also, you can install the rpc_relay.html and canvas.html to the root(~/) of your site or you can download and install them when you setup your site with Google Friend Connect.
• Goto Settings and select Extensions tab.
• Look for Google_Friend_Connect_Social_Bar under the Name column and click on Edit link on the same row. 
• In the next page, change the Site UD to your own Google Friend Connect’s Site ID. Please note that if your code is not valid, an empty bar will appear but I cannot guarantee what will happen on your site.

• You can also change the Div Tag ID. Since, IMO, it’s used just to differentiate one div tag from other  div tags, when multiple Google Friend Connet’s widgets are used, if you are only using this extension i.e. no other widgets installed, you won’t need to change it(at least worked for me:)).
• Allow Anonymous Post. as it’s name suggests that you can decide if you want to allow only people who join your community to comment or any one who visits your site(they don’t have to join your site to post comment).

Possible Updates

• Allow you to change the position of the Social Bar(Top or Bottom).
• Change the text of the default text ( “- Let me know about your thoughts –“)
• Possibly allow the poster to post YouTube links

All this features are actually supported by Google Friend Connect and if you are good at playing with C# files, it shouldn’t be too hard to modify the code to suit your needs. I’ll just provide this facilities who don’t know anything about programming yet want to use it.

Download here

GFCSB.zip

Hint for next post: Have you ever thought of a program that makes creation of BlogEngine.Net’s extension, a piece of cake?