Over the course of the last few days, I learned one major thing.  I am NOT a developer. Not even close.  What else I learned was that I do know what I’m doing, and can follow with the big boys, I just can’t do it.

I spent a lot of time at the google plus sessions.  My goal was to learn how to use the API.  Specifically my goal (I failed at it), was to be able to put a horizontal +1 button with all of those who like it:

I was amazed to learn what I can do with the new History API.  While understanding my limitation, I did just want to change the style of the +1 button.  I wanted it specifically to be inline (just like you see above).  I wanted to link to the page, be shareable, and be traceable (analytics already does this).

Checking out the developer site, they showed me what to do, and how to do it.  It said “place this [insert spot] here.  On the admin side to WordPress there are close to 50 different pages (5 or so more specific post related pages).  I had no idea where the post was actually rendering.

All the googlers were willing to help, but they were at a loss.  Their wordpress ninja eventually conceded that he rolled his own theme, as well as his own code for most of his site.  He did work with me for a while, but the mutual agreement was to find a plugin that will incorporate this.  Again, I’m not a developer, but I can read and understand code.  Adding pre written code should be easier.

The first thing I am asking for is the ability to paste common social codes directly into the themes.  How does someone paste adsense codes, google +1s, likes, shares, tweets, etc… without running through a widget or plugin.  I know wordpress is supposed to focus on the content, and not the back end, but this should be simple [enough].

The other cool thing that the history API will eventually do is to pull google+ comments. I want to be able to pull google+ comments from plus itself and post them to wordpress.  I haven’t thought about how exactly I want this to work, but I figure that if someone posts on plus, they are already authenticated, which means there doesn’t need to be a second wordpress authentication.

So feature request two is: Can we incorporate commenting from other networks without having to use disqus, or another third party?

I want harness google+.  Google showed over the last few days that google+ is here to stay, and I’m excited.  Read later on the features, but I want this to work, and I want to incorporate it into my blogging strategy.

I want to thank all the googlers who helped me over the last few days.  This post was recommended by them, so they can ask Matt Mullenweg on how to proceed next.