Social Bookmarking in WordPress

At the time of writing this post you’ll probably notice (and it has been there a while) a “ShareThis” option at the bottom of each post and page. This allows readers to share the details on one of many Social Bookmarking sites using the popular ShareThis service ⁱ.

Unfortunately, using a third party such as this does present problems. First of all it’s not the smallest ⁱⁱ and it does rely heavily on JavaScript, which causes problems if you want to add a share facility in a news feed. They also spend a lot of the time trying to further push their service, adding on facilities you may now want and constantly trying to get the user to sign up. Not only that, but to be all things to all sites, it present a very long list of  bookmark possibilities. If anything, this is more than likely going to confuse the amateur user.

And, back to the technical downsides, you’re often reliant on third party apps to provide the bookmarking system on your site, which limits what you can do. Well, it’s either that or learn their API.

The BBC uses it’s own method and that’s to simply present a few of the most popular – it doesn’t use JavaScript, just simple images and links to the resultant bookmarking sites. And, because it doesn’t use JavaScript, you can stick the same details on the bottom of your news feeds. So, you lose access to some of the less popular bookmarking services – is that a great problem? They often come with their own bookmarklets and plugins anyway.

So, over the coming weeks you will find the ShareThis plugin being replaced with seperate bookmarking options. Yes, I will be writing this as a plugin which I will then publish – it will integrate Simple Twitter Link and Simple Facebook Link as well. But I digest…

Here, simply because I had to compile them anyway, are the URLs required for some of the more popular social bookmarking services…

Delicious – http://del.icio.us/post?url=[url]&title=[title]
Digg – http://digg.com/submit?url=[url]&title=[title]
Diigo – http://www.diigo.com/post?url=[url]&title=[title]
Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=[url]&t=[title]
Fark – http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/farkit.pl?u=[url]&h=[title]
reddit – http://reddit.com/submit?url=[url]&title=[title]
StumbleUpon – http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=[url]&title=[title]

In all cases, replace [url] with the URL and [title] with, erm, the title.

1. and, as always, other such services exist elsewhere![↩]
2. as in terms of code size and, therefore, the speed of your site[↩]