Automatically create “Email this” features for wordpress.com blog posts using the one-click Feedburner bookmarklet
24 03 2008HERE is the one-click Feedburner bookmarklet I created to help you automatically generate the Feedburner web form with which you can offer your readers the option to email your wordpress.com blog posts to friends!
“Email this post” Feedburner bookmarklet for wordpress.com blog posts
Step-by-step instructions
- Copy the code from the above link in a Notepad file.
- Open a new Notepad file and paste the code. Be careful to paste the code as it is. Save the Notepad file as an html file. Just write Email this post.html in the SAVE dialogue box and the html file will be created!
- Open the Email this post html file in Firefox. The hyperlinked words email this post will appear in the window.
- Place the cursor over the link. Drag and drop the link in the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder of your Firefox. This will generate a new bookmarklet in your Firefox.
All this is a one-time process. Now every time you need to offer “Email this post” feature under your wordpress.com blog post, do the following.
- Publish a blog post.
- View the blog post. Make sure you see the permalink of the post in the address bar, and not the blog url!
- Click the “Email this post” bookmarklet. An email this web form from Feedburner corresponding to the blog post will be generated!
- Copy the url from the address bar.
- Go back to Edit mode of your blog post and write the words “Email a friend” under the blog post.
- Link the words “Email a friend” to the copied url. Just paste the url in the Link dialogue box!
- Save and view the post. If you click the link “Email a friend” you will find the web form that will enable your readers to email the blog post to a friend!
***
As mentioned in my earlier posts, this trick will only work if you have Feedflare activated for your blog. Log in to your Feedburner account and view your feed. Click the tab “Optimize” and choose Feedflare (on the left). Activate and save it. If you don’t have a Feedburner account, create one now and burn your feed. It’s easy and free! Feedflare enables several blogging platforms to automatically have “email a friend” options for posts - when it’s activated and “email a friend” option is saved. Unfortunately, wordpress.com is not one of them and this is why we have to use a roundabout solution.
By the way, burning your feed at Feedburner as opposed to using the default feed of your wordpress.com blog has other advantages, Engtech has created an eloquent list.
***
An added extra
The “email a friend” Feedflare functionality from Feedburner that works for non-wp.com platforms incorporates only the blog post title in the web form. But my bookmarklet generates not only the title of the blog post, but also the title of the blog!
So, now that I have made your life a lot easier, how about appreciating me? 
The comment box is just for you!
***
Promote this post!
Email a friend
Bookmark and share! Help others find this easy solution.
![shoyong [at] gmail.com](http://gickr.com/results3/anim_9c7960ac-8183-28d4-4596-dd90f72a69c9.gif)
Netty Gritty
[...] improved One-click Feedburner bookmarklet I have created a one-click Feedburner bookmarklet to generate “Email this” links for wordpress.com blog…. As fas as I have tested, it generates the post title in the web form without exception. Also, [...]
I’m glad you succeeded! It’s a pity wordpress.com does not allow any kind of javascript code even in links, but it seems you found a solution which suits your needs. The main difference between the two approaches is, that your bookmarklet requires the post being already published, while the bookmarklet I wrote is supposed to be used while writing the post. Your approach is “safer”, because it reads information which are already there, my one have some failure potential because it has an algorithm to create the post permalink. Both didn’t solve the “future post” problem…
Anyway, this little project made a lot of fun! I’ll keep you informed about the ff extension.
hey,
welcome back!
yeah, i had fun, alright! i can’t believe i was smart enough to create the bookmarklet! i wish i were a hardcore coder - i love the excitement so!
ye, future post is an issue, i guess. what i will do is do a future post and link the
“email a friend” thingies when the time comes.
keep going with the ff extensions. it’ll be wonderful to have those things.
Nice, you thought that all up yourself? Got to give it to you!
yes, i did that all by myself. i had a two-month-long course (which constituted html, js and php - just the basics) and intuition to do it. it’s quite surprising that i remembered the js basics enough - learned a year ago - to do educated guesswork. i analysed three bookmarking bookmarklets and replaced the variables as needed and “eureka”! the magic code was born!
Nice! I still wonder when I’ll do my HTML, JS and PHP related courses. So far, I know a little bit of HTML and only the full names of JS and PHP. I’m a little familiar with CSS which is so easy you can learn it within a day without doing any course what so ever. That’s how I did it.
u r still so young, li’l ‘un! don’t fret, you have time! if you really love codes, then how about being a pro coder?
if i knew coding was so much fun earlier, i would have started loooong ago. now it’s a little too late, i think.
but i would love to make cool ff extensions one day. i wonder how much one has to learn in order to do that!
Very cool “Email This” feature. But when I follow the instructions, it says (for example) “Study on College Campus Rape, Harassment, and Stalking ? For the Record.”
“For the Record” is the name of the blog. Any idea why it adds that onto the end of my post title? It does that with every post and I don’t know enough about programming to know why. (I know little about programming so far.)
Thanks.
hello lara,
thanks for trying out the bookmarklet and also thanks for being here. what you see is perfectly normal! the web form not only shows the post title, but also where the post came from; ie; the blog title.
it’s supposed to do it with every post. that is, both the blog post title and blog title will show.
did you notice the double “less than” signs? these are accepted ways of showing hierarchy in links. the web form shows titles in this manner:
blog post title<<blog title. that means, the blog post (title) is under the blog (title).
i hope this helps!
Yeah, I know.
But it isn’t showing double “less than” signs–it’s showing a question mark inside a solid color diamond. I admit that’s new to me. Will it come out right when it’s actually posted?
Can’t wait. Thanks for a great post.
guess what,
the ?diamond thing is new for me, too. i reckon it’s the way the form is created. i have no idea why it’s showing a ?cube to you when i can see a <<.
try emailing the post to me (my email - shoyong [at] gmail [dot] com - and i will reply to you. it will reach me just fine. send the post to me asap!
what really matters is the blog post url. i think u r having no problems with that.
if you really need to have a <<, then i’m afraid u will have to send me the bookmarklet again. i will have to see if you changed anything inadvertently!
Hi, sorry for the delay, was out this weekend. I’ve viewed it and tested it, and it works fine.
No idea why the funky display. But given that it’s working, I’m going to use it as is. Your code is right on.
Thanks again!
hey lara,
thanks for letting me know that it works!
happy blogging!
lara,
if by any chance you are reading this, please accept my heartfelt apologies. the code i provided previously was slightly different from the finalized code. i rechecked the code because you had problems with it.
i have replaced the code and this seems to work fine on my end. do drop by and use this code instead of the previous one.
once again, sorry for the disappointments and also thanks for pointing out the glitch. if it weren’t for you, i probably wouldn’t have rechecked it.
[...] If you are like me, you probably feel underprivileged. But say good-bye to disappointments. Here is how you can work Feedburner to have “email a friend” option under the posts of your wordpress.com blog. The manual process discussed in this post is no longer applicable, because there is a much better way to generate Feedburner “email this” links for your posts. I have created a Feedburner bookmarklet that automatically gets the job done. To learn how to use the bookmarklet, use the following link: How to use the “Email this post” Feedburner bookmarklet for wordpress.com blog posts [...]
I want to use a flash graphic that has animation and a form for the user to email the graphic to a frend just like evite of egreetings. How can I do that from my blog? Basically I’d like users to email an egreeting from my blog.
Thank Alex
hello arossbiz,
i am sorry to say that i can’t help you.
the script you need is different - and it is beyond my expertise.
perhaps you can look for an answer at yahoo answers?
Really cool! Thanks for the SIMPLE step-by-step instructions. It seemed to work for me even though I’m not signed up w/ feedburner. Or does feedburner somehow allow you to keep track of how many people use it?
I’ve tried to implement this functionality before only to find all the solutions required way too much coding expertise. Yours worked like a charm! I’ll put a link to your page in a future post - or is there some other way you want to be credited?
It’s only on one post so far, but after some testing, we’ll probably put it on all of them. http://jflohr.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/the-cfo-and-a-duck/
thanks again!
The fiber guy
hello jflohr,
a very warm welcome to my blog!
i’m flattered to learn that my post made you so happy.
i wonder how it worked for a blog that doesn’t have “email this” feedflare enabled - as far as i know, it’s needed. maybe it’s a new phenomenon? i will test it on your blog via my bookmarklet and see.
linking to my post in a post of yours is just fine. and why, thanks very much for the kind thought!
[...] of the of each posting for the “Email this post to a friend” link. I have to thank Sanjida at Netty Gritty blog for helping me out with this feature. (And don’t worry - by using ’send to a [...]
Netty G. that’s a nice piece of code you wrote there. Haven’t tried it out yet (will do so tonight), but judging by the excitememnt level, I’d say you did something good– kudos. I wanted to ask, do you know of anyway to use Feedburner to track stats on a wordpress.com blog? The code FB generates doesn’t seem compatible with Wp.com because when I paste it in the “text” widget (I paste there because there’s nowhere else to paste), it shows up on the front end of the blog. Please help.
hello papa b-a,
thanks for dropping by!
which fb stats are you talking about? the one that shows how many rss readers you have? sorry, but i can’t help you if i am confused about the question!