RSS feedLast week I wrote about some of the social bookmarking plugins that you can use on your wordpress blog. These plugins add a collection of icons of social bookmarking sites underneath each post. I received the question from several of you what your options are if you want to put these icons in the sidebar of your blog or on your website.
If that is where you prefer to have your icons you can use so-called widgets. These widgets comprise of a few lines of code that you can put on any number of pages on your website or in the sidebar of your blog. Let’s see how this works with one of the most popular widgets, “ShareThis”.
When you go to ShareThis.com you will see section that says ‘Share your site’, with a green button with the text ‘Get the Button’. When you click on the green button you will be taken to a screen where you can customize your widget. In this particular case you can change the text at the top of the square, the header text, font and background color and you can select which social bookmarking sites you would like to present to your readers. When you have made your selections, you tell ShareThis which service you are using (own website, wordpress, blogger or Typepad). Last action is to click on the ‘Get Share This Code’. In the screen that follows, you can copy the code for the button. The button I made is shown in the picture below. The red arrows indicate the things you can change.
If you are using the code on your regular website, you paste the html code in the spot where you want the widget to show up. If you are using the widget on your wordpress blog, you go to widget section of your theme and select a text box. You past the code in the text box and the widget will show up in the sidebar of your blog. If you are using blogger, it is even easier. Make sure you are logged in on your blog. Share this will recognize your blog and add it automatically for you. If you don’t want that you can also click on ‘Add a gadget’ in the settings page of blogger and add the HTML code yourself.
Now that you know how easy it is to add a social bookmarking widget to your site, you are probably ready to find out which social bookmarking widgets are most popular. Next to ShareThis, the most widely used ones are AddThis (also provides a plugin, as you could read in last weeks post), AddToAny and TellAFriend. They all operate in a similar way as ShareThis. Simply follow the instructions and you can have your bookmarking button up and running in no time.
