WordPress template for Social Bookmarking

I’ve been looking at Social Bookmarking sites and what kind of impact they’re having on the way the general Internet populace finds news, tells the world about their discoveries and in general increases activity on a particular topic of interest faster than any search engine ever could.

I recently modified the blog template on my site to include a “Click to Social bookmark” section below each post title as you must have noted.

Want the same section on your site? Read on…
My Social Bookmarking section seems to have gained some sort of audience and I thought I’d go
ahead and give it off to anyone who was interested. So I made a
Wordpress template for everyone to use. If anyone’s interested I could
make a Blogger template as well. Ask for it if you want it.

The WordPress template snippet

Here’s the WordPress template snippet: dhirajgupta_socialbookmark_wordpress.zip

How to install?
This will currently only work for people who host their own WordPress blogs with someone other than WordPress. This seems to be a requirement for you to be able to edit your WordPress theme – they don’t let you edit it right there.

You’ll need to be able to add the images for the template and also the Overlib javascript library.

The template snippet expects the images for the Social bookmarking block to be present in a folder called Images inside the folder where you have the WordPress template. This is the norm and you should already have it. Copy the images from the zip file to your template’s Images folder.

Next you need to install the Overlib Javascript Library. This is what allows the template to have those neat tooltips on the hover of each Social Bookmarking site. This is usually quite painless and should not pose a problem. Get the Library and install it on to your blog template according to their instructions.

Next it’s time to finally insert my Social Bookmarking template snippet into your actual WordPress template. To do this, open up the wordpress.html file from the zip file you downloaded from my site. Copy all the contents from this HTML file into the correct place in your “The_Loop” section. Normally you would paste it right under your title header area. Save and refresh your blog; you should see the Click to Social Bookmark link come up.

Place, lay it out and tweak according to your preferences.

And in case you have any problems, do let me know.

A word of caution
I’m not quite an experienced WordPress user, any help / assistance / feedback on the working of the template snippet would be quite appreciated.

This template snippet will end up increasing the page download size of your blog for first time visitors, a little bit. The stuff that gets added (Overlib JS, image) should be cached by the browser well, though. Your Mileage May Vary.

This is not really a full blown template yet, it requires you to already have a template ready. If any of you’ve got a cool template and would like to share it with the rest of the Internet along with the Social Bookmark section incorporated, do drop me a line. :)

Licensing?
I really don’t want to get into any kind of licensing or that kind of stuff. So please consider it free of all restrictions, modify, use, do *whatever* you want to, with it.

If you’re feeling thankful, you could leave a shoutout on your site. Do tell me if you find it useful, here or by feedback.

Shoutouts
A big shoutout to Socializer, for inspiration on this.
A bigger shoutout to NEO Binaries for helping me find Socializer in the first place! I just clicked Bookmarks on the comprehensive category list.

A big shout out to the guys at Overlib too, you guys rock! :)

23 thoughts on “WordPress template for Social Bookmarking”

  1. Sorry Dhiraj, it took a long time to get back here.

    Removing the DOCTYPE did work, although that’s not really the best solution if one cares about validation. I do realize that your plugin is a take-as-you-can-get deal and I appreciate the work you put into it. It would be great if you were able to fix the bug in the next version or, at the very least, mention it in the intro at the top of this page. I put in a good amount of time trying to figure it out.

    Not that I’m not grateful…I am. It’s a pretty cool plugin. Thanks again, and for your helpful response.

  2. Awesome site Rus! :)

    The social bookmarking template is working fine in IE, but Mozilla Firefox refuses to pop it out. I’ve observed this happen with other blogs, the simple fix that I’ve seen usually work is to remove the doctype header from the top of your blog template.

    It really looks cool in IE though. :)

  5. Well, I never saw that one happen before. If you could give us the URL where you’ve set up the blog, I could possibly help.

    Or alternatively, mail me the template at dhiraj at this domain (dhirajgupta.com)

  6. I installed your template and it works great on IE, but in Firefox I’m getting an error in the js console that says “sb28 is not defined”. Is this a known issue? I would have thought I’d have seen it in your comments. Scratching my head… I tried some workarounds but no dice..

  8. Well, I would have to agree with you on that one, Matt. The marketing for the Socializer service has gone a bit awry. I think the Socializer is more useful for people who want to solve the problem of having too many sites to list to have people actually go and bookmark. Socializer solves that by putting in a single link and then letting the user bookmark what he wants to, when he clicks.

    I decided to go for a slightly different approach, but expanding the whole thing for the user right there.

    I also agree with the philosophy with Tagtooga’s tool for posting on multiple sites, but I don’t end up using these. A reason why would require a long discussion, but basically, I’d rather just let whatever visitor wants to bookmark wherever do it themselves, ultimately.

    When I do bookmark, I like to leave a little personal something wherever I do it, which is not really possible with the tool, or with other services like say OnlyWire. I’d rather just use something like Pingoat to let the search engines know that there’s something new to crawl. :)

  9. Let me clarify one more thing.

    3spots.blogspot.com *is* much more than just a list — they’ve done great work in reviewing the sites they list. If I have a gripe, it’s about the “Web 1.0″ style lists such as at econsultant.com — where it’s nothing more than a non-editable list of links. Sorry for the excessive posting — I’ll shut up now.

  10. “Maybe we can use these to pick up suitables in the list, as well? I also want to look at trimming the list a little. We could prune out the ones that are not really popular.”

    I appreciate the work that people do to make online lists like 3spots.blogspot.com, but they suffer from these problems:
    1) You don’t know what is popular and what is not.
    2) You depend on the author to be listed.
    3) In the future, the author inevitably will become too busy to keep the list up to date. Links will become stale and the latest/greatest will be missing from the list.

    (I’m talking in general, not just about 3spots…)

    From Day 1, tagtooga.com was focused on providing a solution to this problem. Well, actually it was spawned from a hatred for DMOZ and all it represents — the non-impartial editors guarding their little fiefdoms, but that’s another gripe. Anyway, I wanted an alternate DMOZ where instead of waiting for an editor to accept your submission, it behaved as a Wiki. The click-throughs are tracked and the most popular sites are sorted to the top whereas others drop off. It has built-in anti-spam features, user “Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down” voting, cross-referencing, automatic link checking on a periodic basis, programmatic APIs for the import/export of data, syndication features, etc.
    The search function on the site is even built such that if there are multiple lists of the same thing, the most popular lists will show first.

    Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone “gets it” yet. The popular “Web 2.0″ lists to be found on the web are all done in “Web 1.0″ style.

    Here is an example: http://www.tagtooga.com/web+2_2E0/social+bookmarking

    New submissions get a grace period and stay at the top for a little while, so as to be seen, until eventually the page will be re-sorted based on popularity…

  11. Dhiraj,

    The Socializer is nice, but to submit to multiple bookmarking sites, you still have to click on each and submit them one-by-one. There is a little-known tool at TagTooga.com which allows you to submit to multiple bookmarking sites in one button click. Here is a screenshot: ScreenShot. (Not sure if the link will show…)

    In the TagTooga.com settings (for your account) you can set the login/password for a number of social bookmarking sites. Once you add your site to TagTooga.com, you can click on an icon to display the submission form, and TagTooga will submit the link to all the bookmarking sites where you have provided a login/password. The submission is logged, and you can check the status of each submission by clicking on a “messages” link in the TagTooga left rail.

    I don’t think this is a replacement for your tool. Yours is great for bloggers to put on their blog(s) to allow a visitor to easily submit to the social bookmarking site he/she uses. The Socializer is marketing their tool as multi-submission, but to submit to N sites still requires the user to fill out and submit N forms. The TagTooga tool is a multi-submitter where submitting to N sites requires 1 form submission.

    Let me know what you think…

  12. Thanks for the links :)
    About trimming and keeping ‘only the popular’ I noticed it’s quite hard to find out. Some service are popular but the buttons are not often used, and some the opposite.
    For example I use the bookmarklets even when there are buttons… so how to find out?
    Maybe if everybody checked their statistics we could get a vague list.

  14. I was just checking out StartAid (they’re rotating banner adverts all over my site) and I couldn’t figure this one out at all.

    It’s got some weird thumbnail concept. Anyone got any handles / ideas on this one?

  15. Cool! :)

    I’ll get on to adding fantacular, blogmemes, and Socializer as soon as I can.

    Thanks for the direct URLs, Steven and Kenji, they *really* help.

  18. Awesome work! I gave this page a Thumbs Up in Stumbleupon *and* I bookmarked it in about 6 social bookmarking engines. I hope it helps your work get noticed!

  19. Cool – thanks! On the Socializer home page I have some logos/images you can use. Please feel free to use them.

    I just took a look at fantacular.com – I couldn’t find a bookmarklet or similar way to submit links via a URL. Did you find anything?

    Pierre

  21. Nice site Dhiraj! I’m glad you like the Socializer (yes, it’s me, the author!).

    Can I suggest you add a Socializer link to your template as the “all others” link, so that you cover ones you don’t explicitly include? I’ve seen this many times where people add links to their favorite social bookmarking sites and then link to the Socializer as “all others”. Works a treat.

    And I guess I need to add a fantacular link too :) Thanks for the heads up!

    Pierre

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