Blogspot bug: Google+ Share button and Google Friend Connect widget

Recently I observed that the Google Friend Connect widget that shows my site’s followers on the left panel sometimes cannot be displayed. Refreshing the page did not help; clearing cookies and browser cache could only make it appear momentarily – the widget would disappear again eventually.

Firefox’s error console (accessible via Tools>Error Console or Ctrl-Shift-J) and this post provide some hint:

The error messages are:

Error: google.friendconnect.container is undefined

The .js file used for Google “+1″ button displayed at the end of every post is possibly conflicting with the js file for the Followers widget. As the both script files are obfuscated, it is not worthwhile for me to spend time investigating where the problem is. I ended up disabling the Share bar after every post by opening the Design tab of my blog settings, clicking Edit button at the bottom of the Blog Posts element, and unchecking Show Share Buttons

This would disable the entire set of share buttons even though I know I only need to disable the Google+ button. As there seems to be no way to show/hide each button individually, the only way to show only specific Share buttons (for example, share via Facebook) is to modify the page template and manually add in the code for the button.

Once you have manually modified the page template, always use the Edit HTML tab, and not the Page Elements tab to change the blog layout. Otherwise your changes may be lost and there may also be other unexpected results.

This is too much trouble, so the set of Share buttons at the end of every post in my blog will be disabled until this bug is fixed…