Yes, hellooooooo!  Now I can seeeeeee your gravatars when you click “Like” on my post because up until about a week or so ago, if you remember, all I had was the darn WTI Thumbs Up button. That WTI plugin only gave me numbers and is not connected to any WP users. Because of that, for a long time, I haven’t got a clue who the “likers”are.  Very annoying.

But I made do with it because I’m self-hosted. That means, standard things such as  the “like”, “re-blog”,  “follow” buttons and a friendlier comment box which 200 million other wordpress.com users have – the most important things any blogger could ask for, are not native to wordpress.org.  That means, I’ve got to settle for alternative plug-ins instead when I decided to go self-hosted 2 years ago. I just gave up trying to figure it out after spending unproductive time to figure it out; perhaps we hadn’t look at the right places.

Besides, I haven’t seen those buttons on any self-hosted sites I know, and if there are, I haven’t been paying attention. I decided that I was done mucking about with my site. I can’t be bothered to stay bothered. 

Up until about 2 weeks ago. That was when I popped over at  Faraday’s Candle and realised that hey! the sisters have managed to put in “Like” on their self-hosted site! They figured it out and I just have to know how!  So, really, I’ll have to thank none other than Faraday and some support from WP for that! You have noooo idea how so very happy I am to be able to finally know that it can be done, because when I asked around about 2 years ago, I just could not find the answers! 

Not only do I have the “Like” button, I also figured out how I can embed the native wordpress “Follow” button that should sit on my side-bar underneath my little about snippet. (It had worked for a couple of days until 2 days ago. Urrrgh!) Duh! You’d say; and never mind that I’m sounding like an idiotic moron, but for me, this is a major dumb-blonde-moment breakthrough! Only almost 2 years later!

Two tiny tweaks done over several days  is a big deal, especially since I’m a tech idiot who also have very little patience to figure out the back-end and one who has given up trying to figure it all out.

So finally, finally, finally, I now have one of most offensive buttons in the blogging universe on a self-hosted site. And yes I’m saying it again that I am super, super happy that I now am finally able to see my Likers whom I haven’t been able to before! This is major and thank you, Faraday!

The only thing is, sometimes, it takes a while for the damn Like thing to load. And I mean a looooooooong while as it keeps on loading away, and soooooooo, I don’t always get to see who has clicked on the Like immediately. Very.Damn. Annoying. Not sure why that is, and I guess I’ll figure it out in time. I now also need to figure out how to embed the damn follow button again because the code generator now only works on a wordpress.com. Why! Oh why!

Still, it’s something. Annoying. But something. And I’m a little less stupid now. Here are the links in case you happen to also be in a rut on those offensive buttons if you are self-hosted:

• How to enable Likes for your self-hosted site: https://jetpack.me/support/likes/

• How to add the Follow button on your self-hosted site (will have to update this, because up until 2 days ago, this was working fine):
  • You need to configure your own button as this is not built into Jetpack.
  • Use the options on this page to generate the code for your WordPress.com Follow Button: https://developer.wordpress.com/docs/follow-button-creation/
  • You can then add the generated code snippet to embed the Follow button in a Text Widget.