Add a digg count to your WordPress posts

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.”