Four stages of adding AddThis to this WordPress.com blog: (1) attempt; (2) hey, it seems to work; (3) no, it doesn’t; (4) providing bonus links; (5) returning a few weeks later and adding AddThis to the sidebar.
(1) Original post was as follows. Right now, I’m just trying to see if WordPress.com will allow use of an AddThis blog button… will edit this post later.
(2) Here’s the later, rather optimistic edit.
You’d like people to bookmark your stuff, especially if they use a social bookmarking service. So you’d like to put a button (or other link) on your blog (or other site) to make it easy for visitors to bookmark you. The trouble is, there are so many social bookmarking services that you don’t want to include a button for each of them.
So you’d like one button to rule them all. AddThis provides such a button. Actually it provides several, the smallest of which appears in this post. Now, down to business, via TechCrunch.
AddThis is gathering some very interesting data that can form the core of a business model now that they have fairly deep penetration. They’re releasing some of this data… AddThis also sees what stories people are bookmarking.
I’m considering putting the AddThis button on the sidebar of this blog. That’s saying something, given my current minimalist tastes.
There is an AddThis blog. The current post tells us that AddThis is now serving over 2 million buttons each day. The blog uses WordPress. I hope that this will encourage AddThis to continue to produce widgets that don’t use JavaScript. (Such widgets aren’t allowed on WordPress.com, although they are allowed on WordPress blogs hosted elsewhere.)
(3) On later checking, the link from the button doesn’t work. A new window comes up, and allows me to choose a bookmarking site. But when I select a site, and get to it, the URL of the blog page isn’t there. So, apparently WordPress.com does strip out some of the AddThis code.
(4) There’s a thread on AddThis on the WordPress.com support forum.
(5) It now (a few weeks later) seems to work, so I’m putting the button in the sidebar.
you can use the addThis generator for myspace, and replace
&title=with the url of the entry you want to use.Thanks, Adam, I’ll try to get to trying this soon.
Actually, maybe I didn’t get the issue but the button in a Text sidebar widget does seem to work as planned (i.e., the URL is maintained). Only problem is, the post’s title is replaced by the post’s URL (same thing with your button). Still, it’s usable.
When will we see the “mother of all” social bookmarking tool?
Merci, Enkerli,
Yes, AddThis does seem to work here now, albeit with the silliness you describe. I’m not sure we’ll ever see the mother of all social bookmarking tools… I’m pretty happy with delicious myself.
Delicious is fine, especially with Flock. These days, I’ve mostly been using Spurl.net which kind of combines some of the features of the ScrapBook Firefox extension with social bookmarking. Some functions don’t work but as it creates an RSS feed (like delicious), I can keep those links in a sidebar on my blog and keep the full text of those entries.
hello andrew,
i have created an addthis bookmarklet for wordpress.com blog posts. it will automatically create an addthis url for a specific blog post. after you publish the post, view it and click the bookmarklet and you are done! of course, you have to manually link a button/text to it later and out it under the blog post.
i wonder why you have the addthis button in the side bar. i assume you have it to encourage readers to bookmark the whole blog. if that’s indeed the reason, then you need to format the code a bit.
http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?&url=http://EXAMPLE.wordpress.com&title=BLOG_TITLE
make the necessary changes in the code and link the button to it.
if not, the button is gonna bookmark whatever is in the address bar of your blog – a permalink, a tag page (as in’ http://example.wordpress.com/tag/life) etc. to be sure that it is true, experiment by clicking on the button while having different url’s in the blog address bar.
if you are using it in the side bar to encourage readers to bookmark individual posts, then i’m adraid it’s not very intuitive.
i know i babbled and babbled, but hey, i had to let it all get out of my system!
just a little correction, the url your side bar addthis button links to is not obvious until you choose a social bookmarking site (say, del.icio.us) and investigate the (del.icio.us) url generated in the address bar.
NG, thanks for the comments. I should really just take AddThis out of the sidebar. I agree with you that it isn’t intuitive there. It does exactly what I want it to, but that’s not the same as being obvious to anyone else.
AddThis often annoys me when I see it on other blogs, particularly if it’s on every post. I find ShareThis less obtrusive.
We all berate microsoft for lots of things. But when you look at some of these plugins you realise how good they are.
AddThis…look I’m technical I can build computers and do very nice things with software. But the addthis i downloaded doesn’t come with instructions or a simple .exe. any online instructions are for old versions and assume a knowledge of wp-plugin folders (what are they?). I know Iprobably could have figured that out in the time its taken to write this. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
and yes you’re right it should be at the end of each post not in the sidebar.
bye.