Archives for February 2010

5 social networking sites you haven’t heard of but should be using

When I started blogging, most people didn’t even know what a blog was. There was a kind of pioneer spirit; of breaking new ground. As blogging came into its own and the mainstream media began to buzz about it, blogging became a household word. Soon it seemed as if everyone either had a blog, was starting a blog, or at the very least, was reading several blogs. Those that started early found it easier to rise to the top; they had the new thing and the momentum when the trend came.

Then there was social media. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Digg became great places to promote your newly started blog or to find other blogs and bloggers. Now it seems as if everyone is using these sites to promote their blogs. It can be a difficult task to rise to the top with the well known sites. You have to put in some tremendous work upfront to see results. Not that you shouldn’t utilize these sites, you definitely should. But you also need to consider other avenues that, while not as popular now, could be in the future. These sites can help you build traffic and momentum to get your blog noticed.

Squidoo

Squidoo allows you to write pages called “lenses” on squidoo.com. You can publish these pages free.

Lenses are pages, kind of like flyers or signposts or overview articles, that gather everything you know about your topic of interest–and snap it all into focus. Like the lens of a camera, your perspective on something. (You’re looking at a lens right now).

Using Squidoo gives you exposure as an expert on a given topic. But not only can you get exposure (and possibly traffic to your blog), but you can earn money as well. Squidoo gives you a share of the ad revenue generated by your lens(es). If you are cool, you can give your revenue to charity.

Hubpages

Much like Squidoo, Hubpages allows you to publish “hubs” in areas you are knowledgeable. Gain exposure as an expert, generate traffic and an audience, earn a revenue split.

Anyone can be a part of the HubPages community, a leading source of answers and expert content on the web, where even new authors can enjoy hundreds or even thousands of readers. Authors can even earn money through online ads displayed on their hubs.

Plurk

Plurk is a micro-blogging platform like Twitter. But unlike Twitter, Plurk uses a timeline for “plurks” and threads the responses within each plurk. While Plurk is a little behind Twitter in terms of popularity, this shouldn’t be overlooked as an opportunity for social networking.

Reddit

You may have heard of Reddit, but do you use it? Reddit is similar to Digg and StumbleUpon, providing users an opportunity to rate sites and links either up or down. A great place to find interesting links and participate in community.

Tagfoot

Tagfoot combines social bookmarking ala delicious, tagging like Technorati, rating like Digg, and sharing like Stumbleupon. This Squidoo lens describes Tagfoot like this:

I’m not sure if it’s the bastard child of Digg and HubPages or the lovechild of Del.icio.us and Squidoo. But it’s hot, it’s happening and it’s HERE.

A bonus with Tagfoot is that if you use AdSense, you can get 50% of the impressions for your own ads.

Social Links for Your WP Blog: How to Roll Your Own?

By Chad Butler Leave a Comment

This is Part 2 of a series. You should read Part 1 before continuing on to this post.

For the sake of this article, I am going to assume that the reader is at the most basic level and doesn’t use any fancy editing tools like Dreamweaver, or even Notepad. We are going to do it all in WP. If you are beyond that level, feel free to adjust accordingly.

In order to make this work, you are going to use some simple WordPress functions. These functions happen within what is known in WordPress as “The Loop.” The Loop is used by WordPress to display each of your posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each of the posts to be displayed on the current page and formats them according to how they match specified criteria within The Loop tags.

The Loop begins with the following code:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

and ends with:

<?php endif; ?>

-OR-

<?php endwhile; else: ?>

For more information on The Loop, see the WordPress Codex. It’s a good idea to get familiar with at least the basics of WordPress, even if you are not “a programmer.” There is a lot of good information in the Codex that is easy to understand, even for a beginner.

In order to get the link and title of a given post, we need to get that information while inside the Loop. We will be using two functions: the_title is used to get the title of the post, while the_permalink gets the location to use for the URL. These are php functions and must be called like this:

<?php the_title(); ?>

(On occasion, you might also use the_excerpt to provide an excerpt of the post. Although for most of the social link submissions, this is an optional field.)

Now that you know about the loop, the_title, and the_url, you are ready to add your social media links to your WP theme.

The easiest way to add this to your theme is through the WP admin. You can edit your theme files under Appearance > Editor. (Make sure you have a back up of your theme files in case you make a mistake or need to roll back for some reason.) Depending on your needs, you may need to edit the following templates:

Main Index Template (index.php)
Page Template (page.php)
Single Post (single.php)

Your theme may or may not have all of these. Some use just index.php. But the essentials are the same.

Let’s start with an easy example, delicious. The format for saving to delicious via a link is http://delicious.com/post?url= the post’s url &title= the post’s title. Using the functions we discussed so that WP can put this information in automagically, it would be done as follows:

<a href="http://delicious.com/post?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>">delicious</a>

You can add this to your theme file where you would like your social media links to appear. Most of the time this is going to be after the post content but before the comments.

Adding other links is just a matter of knowing the format of how that particular service needs to get its submissions. Here are some examples for the more popular choices:

Digg:

<a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&amp;url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>&amp;bodytext=<?php the_excerpt(); ?>">digg</a>

Facebook:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;t=<?php the_title(); ?>">facebook</a>

Technorati:

<a href="http://technorati.com/faves?add=<?php the_permalink(); ?>">technorati</a>

Sphinn:

<a href="http://sphinn.com/index.php?c=post&amp;m=submit&amp;link=<?php the_permalink(); ?>">sphinn</a>

Mixx:

<a href="http://www.mixx.com/submit?page_url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>">mixx</a>

Google Bookmarks:

<a href="http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&amp;bkmk=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>&amp;annotation=<?php the_excerpt(); ?>">google bookmarks</a>

LinkedIn:

<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&amp;url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>&amp;summary=<?php the_excerpt(); ?>">linkedin</a>

MySpace:

<a href="http://www.myspace.com/Modules/PostTo/Pages/?u=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;t=<?php the_title(); ?>">myspace</a>

Newsvine:

<a href="http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&amp;save?u=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;h==<?php the_title(); ?>">newsvine</a>

Reddit:

<a href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>">reddit</a>

Sphereit:

<a href="http://www.sphere.com/search?q=sphereit:<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>">sphereit</a>

Stumbleupon:

<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&amp;title=<?php the_title(); ?>">stumbleupon</a>

The advantage of a “roll your own” approach is that you are not limited to the social media links that a plug-in developer has decided to include. If you know the link structure for a particular submission, you can add any site you want and style it any way that you want. This gives you a lot of flexibility and you only really need to do the work one time.

In the upcoming Part 3 of this series, we will discuss how to add images to these links and where to find free icons to use.

Here are some other posts on ButlerBlog that deal with The Loop:

Social Links for Your WP Blog: Use a Plug-in or Roll Your Own?

By Chad Butler Leave a Comment

This is Part 1 of a 2 part post.

It is rare to find a blog these days that doesn’t have some type of social networking links on it. You see them everywhere: follow my tweets, add to delicious, share on facebook, and the list goes on. These days, the knowledge of and the effective promotion using social networking is critical. The question is not “should you add social links to your blog,” but rather, “what is the best way to add social links to your blog?”

There are essentially two ways to go about this. First, and seemingly easiest, is to utilize a plug-in.

Editorial comment: Anyone who has followed this blog knows that I prefer to NOT use plug-ins when it is simple and more efficient to do something directly. Too many people are quick to use a plug-in for every little thing they want to add to their blog and soon it becomes bloated with plug-ins. This is usually followed by compatability issues when upgrading, or finding that new plug-in you just installed breaks your site, but only when plug-ins “A” and/or “D” are active, but not when “B,C, and E” are active. So, I weigh the pros and cons for any plug-in that I might choose to use. If it makes more sense to add feature directly myself, then I don’t bother using a plug-in.

Reasons To Use a Plug-in

1. It’s Easy

Well, I can’t argue with that answer. It is easy to add a plug-in to your WP blog, especially these days when you can do it directly within the admin panel (I recall the “old days” when we had to download a zip, extract, upload to our site, then activate. I also had to walk barefoot through the snow to school and it was uphill both ways; but that’s another story). If your answer is “it’s easy,” I think you will see later in this article that it is just as easy to “roll-your-own.” Essentially then, this reason is offset.

2. Fear of “Programming”

Many of you probably think that because you don’t know the first thing about programming, that your only option is to use a plugin. But you will be surprised how easy it is to add these links yourself. If you can make edits in your template to handle the CSS of your plug-in’s output, you already know enough to add these links directly into your template without a plug-in.

3. Integrated Stats

This one I do not have an answer for. At least one plug-in offers stats integrated into your WP admin panel. I must admit, that is a good reason to use a plug-in. So if this is important to you, then you should find a plug-in that offers this feature.

Recommended Plug-ins

The only plug-ins that I would recommend for this feature are those that offer some type of stats, or other additional features that make their use more than just adding social links to your blog. Honestly, the only one I have found so far is the AddThis WP plug-in (if anyone else knows of some others, feel free to chime in via comments).

Reasons to “Roll Your Own” Social Links

Well, you have stayed with me so far. To quote Tim Robbin’s character Andy Dufresne in the Shawshank Redemption, “If you’ve come this far, maybe you’re willing to come a little further.” Now let’s cover reasons to “Roll Your Own” social links.

1. No Upgrade Compatibility Issues

As a plug-in developer myself, I understand how difficult it is to keep up with new versions of WordPress. It seems every time I turn around, there’s an upgrade. Don’t get me wrong here, that is a good thing. It shows that WordPress is growing and improving. But everytime there is an upgrade, there is a risk that particular upgrade will not be compatible with your plethora of plug-ins. And all it takes is one to bring down your site – then you need to figure out which one it is. That is why I recommend not using plug-ins for simple tasks that you can implement yourself. Don’t use a plug-in if you don’t need to. Then you don’t have to worry about whether it is compatible or not. (And for those of you that put off upgrading because the latest WP release is not compatible with a plug-in you are married to and there is no upgrade yet for the plug-in, just remember that many times these WP upgrades involve security patches. If you don’t like being hacked, or don’t want to be hacked, then don’t put off the upgrades!! I can’t over emphasize this enough!)

2. Less “Bulk” to Your WP Installation

Every time you add a plug-in, you are adding one more thing that has to load for your site. Too many plug-ins can slow down your site. So again, don’t do with a plug-in something that can be done just as easily without.

3. Just as Easy to Implement

I promised you way at the beginning of this article that I would tell you how easy it is to implement social links into your site without a plug-in. Part 2 of this article is going to cover that process.

4. You Can Have Any Social Links

An added benefit of doing it yourself is that you can utilize any social links you want without begging the plug-in’s author to add them for you (or adding them to the plug-in yourself, thereby making your version incompatible with future upgrades – but if you already have the knowledge to do that, why are you reading this?) Part 2 will teach you how to add any social link you want.

Read Part 2, Social Links for Your Blog: How to Roll Your Own