Alex Pooley's Blog

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Here’s a Wordpress plugin that allows you to selectively add social network buttons such as digg, sphinn, etc to your posts or theme design.

There’s a stack of these type of plugins out there, but I couldn’t find one that allowed me to add a button for a social network on a per post basis. My main point of pain was that each of my blog posts appeal to different types of social sites so I wanted to be selective with the social buttons I added to each post. For instance, my SEO and marketing posts are better suited to Sphinn, while my technical posts are better suited to Reddit.

Add Buttons Per Post

To scratch my own itch I devised a wordpress plugin creatively called “Social Buttons”. You write a formatted piece of text in your post, and it’s replaced with the button when converted to HTML. It’s kind of like magic, except real, and without cheesy costumes. For example, to add a digg button I write this…

Add you get this result:

You can add more than a single button if you want…

Add you get this result:

Add Buttons To Your Theme, Or All Posts

It’s also possible to use the plugin within your theme. You add a button to your theme (Digg in this case):

<?php echo sb_make_button('digg', 'http://www.alexpooley.com') ?>

Or, add the same button to every single post (Reddit in this case):

# Inside posts.php of your theme.
<?php echo "I'm in a post now:".sb_make_button('reddit', get_permalink()) ?>

Install

Download the Social Buttons Wordpress Plugin and install the plugin as you would install any other plugin. There are further instructions in the readme.txt if you need them.

If you want a social site added to the plugin then let me know. Or, if you need a particular Wordpress plugin built then get in touch.

Below is a chart of five web 2.0 relates sites, namely digg, delicious, flickr, techcrunch, and technorati, all finding huge growth in April 2006. What the heck happened in April 2006 to spike all these sites? Was it a natural phenomenon, maybe a conference, some complex symbiotic relationship, holidays, change in weather, or did Alexa begin to bias these sites?

(click image for a larger chart)

There’s also a common trend of losing traffic towards the end of the year. You can see the end of each plot is in decline, and the same occurred in 2005. If you took a trader’s technical analysis mind set, you might say that each site spiked at the end of the third quarter and is only falling back to it’s trend line.

The resemblance between the traffic charts of technorati and del.icio.us is unbelievable.