Automatically create “Email this” features for wordpress.com blog posts using the Feedburner bookmarklet

REMEMBER my post on how to create “email this” links for wordpress.com blog posts with the help of Feedburner? I have created a bookmarklet to automate the link creation process.

So don’t cry over the super-necessary “email this” feature for blog posts that never happened at wordpress.com (and probably never will?). Instead rejoice, for the solution is at your fingertips!

To get going, you need to click the link below. It has the primary code that will start the process!

Email_This Link Generator

Step-by-step instructions :

1. Copy the whole code in a Notepad file. (It’s not necessary to understand the code).
2. Save the Notepad file as an .html document - name the file Email_This Link Generator. This name will appear in your browser’s Bookmarks in the end. (If you don’t know how to create html files, don’t sweat! Just write Email_This Link Generator.html in the SAVE dialogue box and the html file will be created!)
3. Open the Email_This Link Generator.html file in Firefox.
4. Save the file in the Bookmarks of your Firefox - just like you would bookmark a site in your browser.
5. Now every time you publish a post, view it in a seperate window (make sure you see the permalink of the post in the address bar!)
6. Now open the the bookmarked file Email_This Link Generator in another tab and copy the code that appears in the window.
7. Go back to the tab that has the permalink of your post in the address bar and click inside the address bar. The url will be selected.
8. While it is still selected, paste the copied code in the address bar over it (or delete the post permalink first). A url will be generated in the window. This is the url that will enable your readers to email the post via a web form from Feedburner.
9. Copy the url from the window (not from the address bar!) and go to the Edit mode of your post. Now write the words “Email a friend” under your wordpress.com post and link the words to the url you copied.
10. Save and view the post again. When you click “Email a friend”, a web form from Feedburner will appear! Your readers can use this form to send your post to a friend.

Mission accomplished! Easy and convenient, no?

You must remember that this trick will only work if Feedflare is activated in your blog. Log in to your Feedburner account, select your feed and click the tab “Optimize”. Now click “Feedflare” (on the left). Activate and save it.

By the way, no use looking for the bookmarklet at Feedburner. They don’t have one.

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Known bugs
I have tested the bookmarklet on several posts of this blog. Sometimes the web form generated through the code has the title of the blog post - which is nice! And sometimes the form says “This Article” instead of the post title.

Help needed
Although it was fun to build the bookmarklet, I am no pro geek. If you are a hardcore coder then why not solve this problem for everyone’s benefit? I would love to know if something is wrong with the coding or if that’s how Feedburner is supposed to behave. Thanks in advance for your help!

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The improved One-click Feedburner bookmarklet
I have created a one-click Feedburner bookmarklet to generate “Email this” links for wordpress.com blog posts. As fas as I have tested, it generates the post title in the web form without exception. Also, it’s a one-click process. Enjoy!

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Coming next

• A bookmarklet that uses post slug to perform the same task. It was done in Italian. If you don’t understand Italian, hang on for the English version!

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Bookmark and share! Help others find the magic wand!