Clarity Strategic^TM

Just like the business about categories v. tags, share buttons in Wordpress blogs deserve a closer look. And first let me say this: there's a big difference between a blog hosted by wordpress.com (what I call the Com Blog) and one hosted elsewhere and powered by Wordpress (the Org Blog). It's the former I'm really interested in here, because it's free and thousands of people depend on it for that reason.

And, because it's free, you're really limited in things you can do to modify it. This is one area you have to watch when you make your blog.

This is an image from the same blog I looked at in the categories v. tags article, "a few good friends..." - notice there is a single button "Share" and above that six other buttons pointing to various social media and social bookmarking services. The single button comes with the theme. It works well, but it hasn't been clicked. Maybe the content isn't very good. Maybe nobody knows about the blog as is. Or maybe nobody feels prompted by the single, less obtrusive prompt.

If the latter is true, the designer could switch to the six above buttons. If it were me, I'd make all six transparent, like the Facebook and Twitter PNG images there. But that's not what we're talking about. If you have a favorite among those six services, you might click on it directly. I'm just about making that choice available. You might also have a theme where the single Share button is not available.

So here's the code for the six buttons.

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td><a href="http://delicious.com/post?url=http://afewgoodfriends.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/mood-music-for-good-friends/&title=Mood music for good friends" target="_blank"><img src="http://afewgoodfriends.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/delicious.jpg" width="50" /></a></td>
<td><a href="http://www.digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http://afewgoodfriends.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/mood-music-for-good-friends/" target="_blank"><img src="http://afewgoodfriends.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/digg.jpg" width="50" /></a></td>
<td><a href="http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http://afewgoodfriends.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/mood-music-for-good-friends/" target="_blank"><img src="http://afewgoodfriends.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/facebook-t.png" width="50" /></a></td>
<td><a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http://afewgoodfriends.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/mood-music-for-good-friends/&title=Mood music for good friends" target="_blank"><img src="http://afewgoodfriends.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/stumbleupon.jpg" width="50" /></a></td>
<td><a href="http://technorati.com/faves?sub=addfavbtn&add=http://afewgoodfriends.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/mood-music-for-good-friends/" target="_blank"><img src="http://afewgoodfriends.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/technorati.jpg" width="50" /></a></td>
<td><a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Reading Mood music for good friends, http://afewgoodfriends.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/mood-music-for-good-friends/" target="_blank"><img src="http://afewgoodfriends.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/twitter-t.png" width="50" /></a></td>
</tr>
</table>

I positioned the images in a table for maximum control. And if you look at the code, you see the images are all located on Wordpress, in the blog's Media Library. Some of the buttons carry the article title as well as its URL. If you were designing this way, you could also use the article's Shortlink instead of its address.

Hey, there's a fair amount of work there, even if you copy and paste the code from one post to the next. You still have to make sure you have the current URL and title. I'm not recommending it; just saying you can DO it.

If you have an Org Blog, you can do this there too. You can add this to your single.php file and take advantage of Wordpress attributes like the_title () to get post-specific info every time:

<?php the_title( $before, $after, $echo ); ?>

And there's the way to make a set of Share buttons just as you like 'em.