How to have social bookmarking icons under each wordpress.com blog post for complete idiots (like me!)

A blogger should make sure that (s)he is helping an interested reader promote her/his blog. Including social bookmarking options under each post can work wonders for a blogger in terms of popularity. As all the tips to do that require some brainwork, or have not enough services, or some glitches I soon lost interest in them and devised a roundabout solution for myself .

Please take note that this tutorial here is not recommended anymore as the same thing can be done minus some extra steps using a different service

( Highly recommended )

 

 

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Step-by-step Instruction

1. Make sure you are either a complete idiot when it comes to figuring out the codes for social bookmarking icons under each post or just plain lazy to do the required brainwork.

2. Stop feeling so lame about it, cos you know, you are not the only one here!

3. Finally get down to business and figure out how many social bookmarking icons you want to have under each post.

4. Create and publish a post (if necessary) where you want the icons to appear.

5. Go to www.tagtoolbox.com and paste the blogpost url in the box where they tell you to post “Website url”.

6. Right above the box where you are supposed to paste the blogpost url you will be asked to “Enter the website title”. Please make sure you enter the title of the corresponding blogpost there.

7. Press the “Create code” button.

8. Voila! You have just got yourself the primary code! (I said primary, cos you won’t be needing it afterwards. ). This primary code comes in a variety of “flavours”. Just copy the first code – “HTML code for text link” – instead of the fancy image links, as you will discard it later anyway.

9. Open the corresponding blogpost in the editing mode. Choose “code” as opposed to “visual” and paste that code under the post.

10. Save the blogpost.

11. View the blogpost and click the “Easy social bookmarking” text link under the blogpost.

12. The link will take you to a treasure trove – of 50 social bookmarking options – at tagtoolbox. As you have already made your choice (step no. 3) you will now click only your preferred bookmarking services one-by-one to figure out the corresponding code for a given social bookmarking service. Let’s click the first one (not a bad one at all either!) – which is “Del.icio.us”

13. A new window opens with a new url in the address bar. This url is what we have been searching for so far! Copy and paste it in a Notepad file.

14. Repeat the steps 12 and 13 to get the url’s of all your chosen social bookmarking icons.

15. From that same page at Tagtoolbox copy the icons you need by right-clicking and choosing “save picture as”. For convenience, save all the icons in a folder.

16. Upload all the images online. It might be advisable to save the image url in a seperate notepad file so that you don’t have to waste time waiting for your hosting site (even if it is your own blog) to load every time you need the image url’s.

17. Open the blogpost in the editing mode and get rid of the primary url under the blogpost (the one that said “Easy social bookmarking”)

18. Paste the icons one-by-one under the post and link them with the appropriate code. For example, if you paste the “Del’icio.us” icon, link it with the url for “Del.icio.us” (the code you found at step no. 13!).

19. Rejoice! Because really, that’s it!

20. If you found this roundabout solution helpful, please help me spread the word by clicking one of the cutesy icons under this post!

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Some important tips

• Remember the primary code – the one that says “Easy social Bookmarking” – at point no. 8? It is better if you don’t save it under your post really. Just save it in a Notepad file, but remember to save the file as an html document, not a .txt document. Now while you are still online, you can open the Notepad file in a new window (just choose file>open) and then click the link”Easy social bookmarking”. Now you can access the booty of 50 social bookmarking sites. From here you just have to click your chosen icons to get the url! The advantage of saving it in a Notepad, instead of your under your post is, you don’t have to delete the code from your post, thus you save some time.

• Once you are done choosing your favourite bookmarking sites and saving the representative icons, save all the icon codes in a single Notepad file as a .txt document. So every time you need the icons you just copy everything in the Notepad file and paste it under your post (of course, choose the “code” mode to do that) and voila, you have the icons!

• After saving the icon url’s, it is advisable to include the “img alt” tag in the icon url. So that if the browser doesn’t display images for some reasons, the text will guide the reader. For example, for the “Del.icio.us” icon, write del.icio.us for the img alt. This also helps as this text shows when the reader hovers the cursor over the image. This post assumes that you know how to include the “img alt”. If you are doing it for the first time, don’t hesitate to ask for help! The comment box is your friend!

• To easily link the icons, now all you have to do it is choose the Rich Visual Editor, select an icon by clicking it and click the “Link” icon (the one that looks like part of a chain) from the tab and paste the url for that icon! Voila! Mission accomplished!

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If you want to do it in another way, check out what Ishmeet, Sunburntkamel, runningthroughrain, userscripts or archaeoastronomy has to offer.

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Please remeber

It requires more steps to get it done the first time. But afterwards, since some stuff are already taken care of, it requires less time.

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Just a thought

If you think your less deserving posts don’t deserve all this extra attention, and therefore you don’t feel up to doing it, you might consider inserting a button from www.dropjack.com . One button will take your users to their readers to that site, where they will have to search if your story is submitted already – and if it isn’t, they can submit your story. Morever, they allow the user to bookmark the post using fifteen bookmarking services and also email a friend! IMO, Dropjack is not very user-friendly

(Although this is a worthy post, I have included a dropjack button for you to test! )

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