Making Your Own Social Bookmarks
- 2 Comment
If you're new here, you may want to browse my articles and if you like them please subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Spent most of my Saturday trying to add social bookmarks to my site, first I checked with Derek but found the plug-in that he recommended never worked properly on my site, so I went around and tried around another 4 plug-ins and believe it or not they also never worked. So I was at the point of giving up when I stumbled on AvgJoeBlogger who wrote the codes for creating your own social bookmarks plug-in, which I will show you later, but first some important info.
Why use Social Bookmarks?
Social bookmarking can make a huge difference to any ones blog, if you get to the front page of these websites then you can see an increase surge of traffic. But to be able to get on the front page visitors are required to vote and this is where the social bookmarks come in.
So what Choices do I have as I blogger?
First and normally easiest is get a wordpress plug-in and upload it and get instant results, there’s many around and they should typically work for most wordpress blogs.
Secondly is go to the sites like AddThis or others and use single button style and generally have most types of social bookmarks in the market.
Lastly is what I ended up doing and that’s creating your own code, this is kinda fun when it works and you have a freedom of choice of colors, styles, fonts etc. Added bonus is that plug-ins take up valuable load up time, so a little code within a page is much quicker.
So what’s next?
So by now you have chosen to make your own social bookmark code so now its time to decide which social bookmarking sites you want to add, currently there’s over 100 different sites, but adding to many buttons later on will create a very messy site. So with this in mind I stuck to 4 of the popular ones ( Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati and del.icio.us) and as traffic is what you are looking for these should be the ones.
So where to place the social bookmarks?
Typically its at the end of the post after your visitor has read the post, for this you will have to amend two pages of html code. Typically the files are the Index and the single page templates, but names will vary from template to template. The codes will be the same for both templates so don’t worry too much.
Now we need to find the loop within the template, wordpress has write up on the details of a loop so I won’t go to in-depth, so we are looking at the index template and searching for the loop, below is simplified template.
|
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?> start of the loop <?php the_content(__('Read more'));?> Your article Somewhere in here should be your social bookmarks <?php endwhile; else: ?> <p><?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?></p> <?php endif; ?> end of loop |
The html code will slightly vary from wordpress versions to others so you will need to play around a little to get it right.
Ok, so now the final part adding the codes
Creating the codes
I have took AvgJoeBloggers codes and added a picture relative to the website , which is always a good thing as the logos/images are what people recognize first.
| Digg |
<a xhref="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>" title="Submit to Digg"><img xsrc="http://yoururl.com/imagelink"> Digg it</a> |
| StumbleUpon |
<a xhref="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>"><img xsrc="http://yoururl.com/imagelink"> StumbleUpon</a> |
| Technorati |
<a xhref="http://technorati.com/faves?add=<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="Add to Technorati Favorites"><img xsrc="http://yoururl.com/imagelink"> Technorati</a> |
|
Del.icio.us |
<a xhref="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>"><img xsrc="http://yoururl.com/imagelink"> Del.icio.us</a> |
So now you should have your basic code for the 4 social bookmarking sites, but you may want take it further. With the use of Dreamweaver you can custom design the layout, colors and sizes etc, like I have done below.
If you require more than the 4 sites I used you may want go over to 100 social bookmarking links. And if its not on the list I don’t believe it exists.
So I hope you have reached the end and have some understanding of the necessary work involved.
Popularity: 34% [?]
Related Posts
Popular Posts
If you found this page useful, consider linking to it.
Simply copy and paste the code below into your web site (Ctrl+C to copy)
It will look like this: Making Your Own Social Bookmarks
2 Comments on this post
Trackbacks
-
maiylah's snippets said:
interesting! I have always wanted to customize my social bookmarks … thanks for these!
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:43 am -
admin said:
it’s my pleasure and hope to see your’s up soon
October 3rd, 2007 at 11:34 pm
