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.

I have created a Wordpress plugins and a Google Gadget so that you can add a ScribbleHere chat room to your blog (it doesn’t have to be as blunt as on my blog), your Google personalized page, your web pages created using Google page creator, and even your desktop!

I haven’t released them just yet. I’m after people to help me try the plugin, and gadget and return any feedback. If you want to be one of the coolest kids in 2007 then contact me and I’ll send through instructions! If being cool isn’t quite enough, then for Wordpress blogs, or public pages where you have added the Google Gadget, I’ll include a link from my blog and possibly from ScribbleHere and Msgpad. Just think of all that glory.

You can see the Wordpress plugin in action at the top of my blog within the orange border. Like I mentioned above, the plugin does not have to hog as much real estate as on my blog. Here’s what looks like on my Google personalized page, and on the desktop.

The Ultimate Tag Warrior

Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) is the mother of all blog navigational aids. The idea is that you associate tags (keywords) with posts so that you can automatically correlate related posts. You can display the tags you’ve assigned for each post, related posts, and you can also display a sorted aggregate (tag cloud) of all the tags. The purpose of organizing your posts in this way is to make it easier for your readers to find material that interests them.

The related posts is an absolute must have feature for me. This information is particularly important for people who are not yet dedicated readers of your blog and found their way to a post on your site through search engines, online social networks, etc. By appending related posts to the end of your posts, you will aid new readers to not only find further information on their topic, but also to determine if your blog content is to their taste.

UTW has a heaps of configurable stuff and a lot can be configured through the UTW options configuration panel. Unfortunately if you want to access the true power of the plugin then you need to pass parameters to PHP calls inside your wordpress template. Take the tag clouds for example. Some of you may be familiar with tag clouds where the font size gets larger for more popular tags. With UTW you have this option, but you also have the option of create a colored tag cloud, a colored and sizable tag cloud, and maybe other options (there’s heaps). For my purposes the tag clouds with different font sizes is too large for my side bars.

While UTW can help organize your onsite content, it’s also possible to use UTW to help optimize your offsite exposure by using tags as meta keywords. I don’t think Google bothers with meta keywords these days, but I’m sure plenty of other search engines do.

Another feature worth mentioning is that you can very easily embed your tags in feeds by selecting a check box in the configuration GUI.

Anyway, that’s the Ultimate Tag Warrior. I’ve only touched on a few key points and I encourage you to try it out for yourself. This plugin is probably the most feature packed, and professional plugins I’ve come across.

Download Ultimate Tag Warrior

Update: I just wrote a post about how to make money online from your blog. Check it out!