Installing and using Social Bookmarking Plugins on WordPress

Today I am going to cover a couple of different way you can add Social Bookmarking to your WordPress blog. Most everyone want their blog or website pages to be shared with the community at large and one great way to accomplish this is to add some buttons to your site to make it as easy as possible for your readers to share what they find on your site with others.

Why would you want to add this to your site? Well the biggest reason is to help your readers share what you have to say with the world by adding either of the plugins discussed here you will be able to add some great interaction to your website and encourage the sharing of information with others.

The two main plugins that I have tested out are Digg Digg and Sociable. Both these plugins work well but take different paths to accomplish similar goals. The biggest difference between the two is that with Digg Digg you will get large icons on your posts and with Sociable you will get a nice row of small icons linking off to the social websites. See the image below for a comparison of the different icons.

Sample of what social bookmarks look like

Installing them is a breeze if you are on a properly configured web server, as I recently discovered when working on a clients website hosted on a different server. Not all servers are created equal and not all installations of WordPress allow for instant install and updates.

So if you are lucky enough to have instant easy install simply go to the add new link under your plugins menu and do a search for the following plugins “sociable” & “Digg Digg” once you locate them simply install them into your site.

Now you need to configure them to show the buttons you want shown on your WordPress website. With Sociable, you get a choice from 99 different bookmark sites. I do not recommend choosing them all but choose about 5 to 10 of your favorites. They will show on your site as in the image above.

Choice of social bookmark sites with Sociable

With Digg Digg you only get a choice of 11 social bookmark sites but they are the most desired ones available. You make the settings for Digg Digg as shown in the image below. One of the issues with Digg Digg is that you only get a choice of 2 sizes for most not all icons and the larger ones are the best. So if you’re looking for something with smaller icons then sociable is what you want. They will show up on you site as shown in the image above.

Choice of social bookmark sites from Digg Digg

I have opted on this site to use the Digg Digg plug in simply because I like the larger icons and don’t want at this time the extended choices from Sociable. Your mileage may vary experiment with them both on your site to see what you prefer and what your users may like.

You might also like