Social Bookmarking for the WordPress.com Masses

If you recently used any of the “Add This” buttons which appeared at the bottom of my Posts to bookmark it on any of the social networking and bookmarking sites and found that you were redirected to bookmark a different site, including unfortunately spam or pron sites, I apologize. Although I followed these directions in the WordPress.com FAQs, after WordPress.com strips out the javascript, the resulting “Add This” form is apparently borked and there’s some sort of redirect happening. Consequently, all the “Add This” buttons have been stripped from my blog.

Since the “Add This” button was inserted using the instructions provided by WordPress.com, I decided to drop a feedback note via my Dashboard telling them about the problem. After several back-and-forth emails the bottom line reply from support was that “…javascript is not allowed on WordPress. The correct AddThis button code should not include any such code. Please consult the FAQ again for full instructions.” Oh, oh-kay then, moving right along…

So I’m now back to using “GetSocial,” a neat little app developed by a WordPress.com user especially for WordPress.com users. While I think this is a great idea, in my opinion there are a couple of minor drawbacks to it. First are the lines and lines of code generated which need to be inserted in your post via the HTML Editor. Lines and lines of code equals increased page weight, but in all fairness, the other options mentioned also do this. Second, the images in the button generated by that code are pulled in from a different WordPress.com blog and are dependent on it. In other words, if that blog is down for some reason, the button images disappear from your blog. Maybe a future version will allow you to host the images on your own blog and then plug the location of the images into the app. At least if your own blog goes down you won’t have to worry about someone wanting to bookmark it and the button not being available. (See Hillel’s comment about how button images are handled.) GetSocial is available for Windohs and needs .net Framework 2.0 installed on your computer to run. This, of course, will be considered the biggest drawback for anyone who doesn’t do Windohs.

There are other options available for WordPress.com bloggers to add social bookmarks to their blog. A search in the ever inventive user-to-user support forum for “social bookmarks” or “social bookmarking” will turn up no small number of discussions. The two most popular of these alternatives are by Sunburnt Kamel and Netty Gritty. All the alternatives seem to be fairly labor-intensive and, as mentioned above, also generate lines and lines of code.

To make a long story short-if you are a Windohs user, want to easily include social bookmarking links on your WordPress.com Posts and are not put off by copying and pasting HTML code in WordPress’ HTML editor, I can heartily recommend “GetSocial”. It will also wash the “Add This” code so that you can put a button in a text widget on your sidebar allowing visitors to social bookmark your blog. (Hillel-feel free to drop my check in the mail! )

Update: Don’t know how I missed it, but teck has written a tutorial on how to use GetSocial.

And speaking of getting social, posting during August will be even lighter than usual while we enjoy having our three offspring home at the same time, a rare occurrence these days.

A short postscript for those WordPress.com bloggers who have Snap Shots enabled on their blogs: “Add This” is an integral part of Snap Shots. However, rather than your site visitors being able to bookmark your Post (if you hover your mouse over your own Post permalink from the front page of your blog, the Snap Shot doesn’t appear), the link you are bookmarking in the Snap Shot is whatever you are linking to in your post. Kinda a lose-win situation, don’tcha think?

Update: September 2009-While I really love GetSocial, I’m now using the “AddtoAny” social bookmarking tool for WordPress.com on my new posts. If you are using an updated browser that supports bookmarklets, it’s very easy to embed the bookmarking tool in your latest published post. T3ck explains all about it in his post, “New Social Bookmark Solution For WordPress.com Blogs Via AddToAny“. (With video tutorials too!)