Add a digg count to your WordPress posts

Posted on December 29, 2007 | Filed Under WordPress

One of the things that originally attracted me to WordPress was the extensibility of plugins. But I have more recently come “full-circle” in my thinking seeking to do more without the use of plugins. Not that I don’t like plugins, but there are some simple tasks that are more efficient to do directly. Too many plugins unnecessarily slow down your blog, in my opinion.

So here is a way to directly place a Digg counter/link neatly aligned in your blog posts using CSS.

For this, I chose the “Digg This” button that you can see at the upper left of this post. This is called via Digg’s own javascript using this:

<script src=”http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

I wanted to have this neatly wrapped in the upper left corner of the content. This is easily accomplished via CSS in a div tag:

<div style=”padding-right: 8px; padding-bottom: 4px; float: left;“>
 <script src=”http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
</div>

Where you place this is up to you depending on your theme. For me, this went in the single.php file just before WordPress outputs the post content with <?php the_content(); ?>.

You can easily add this to your theme using the WordPress theme editor. Go to the WP admin panel and select Presentation > Theme Editor. Using the Theme Editor, you can select the necessary theme file(s) from the right hand side. The single.php template is indicated by “Single Post.”

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I am currently in the process of adding tags to all legacy (pre-WP 2.3) posts. Not all posts have them yet, so this area may be empty



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Comments

2 Responses to “Add a digg count to your WordPress posts”

  1. How To Tutorials on January 20th, 2008 1:12 am

    It would be good to have the title and description auto filled from the blog post. I use a plugin called DiggBader on my blog and it does that.

  2. admin on January 24th, 2008 8:36 am

    Thanks for the comment. However, the point was to NOT use a plugin for a simple task that doesn’t really need one. “Over-plugging” WordPress leads to, IMHO, a less efficient blog.

    That being said, you certainly could just as easily add title and description (and a few other fields) automatically without a plugin. The fields you can pass can be reviewed here: http://digg.com/tools/integrate#3 Those could be easily populated with some simple php or js. (Maybe a topic for a followup post?)

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