Sharing widgets--what do YOU use?

[matgb]

One of the best things about the internet is the ability to share stuff with friends and others. It can be stuff you've made, done or written, or it can be stuff you've found. Lots of people like doing this so much that there're sites dedicated to the whole idea, or have that sort of function built in as an attraction to users.

Making it easy makes sense

If you're creating content, encouraging others to share what you've written with their friends normally makes sense. Making it easy for them makes it likely that they'll do it. Well, normally, some churlish types are less likely to share something if the site's trying to make it easy. No pleasing some people...

The first weblogs were, literally, logging the web, they existed to share cool stuff found. Now? Billions of aps out there. Awhileback, Debi polled her readers to find out what they like to use, I'm just going to ask.

coding sharethis buttons

I'm coding a share this set of buttons, initially for my and miss_s_b's layout, but eventually to possibly be submitted as part of the core function of Dreamwidth. I don't want to have too many little buttons, but I think I can make it so users can choose which buttons appear on their layout, and today I finally asked how I could strip the html, a silly little problem that'd be stopping me for weeks. I also want to have it only display on public entries, but that's a lesser issue.

I want it for my reading page, to allow easy sharing of links for me. That it might encourage others to share stuff I've written is an added bonus. If I ever get around to writing again regularly.

So, already coded I have Facebook, Livejournal, Twitter, Dreamwidth, Blogger, StumbleUpon, Bit.ly and LibDig (the last being, obviously, a very niche sharing tool). What major tools have I missed?

Unfortunately, as far as I can see, I can't do one for Wordpress.com, let alone custom installs, as the post page is always within your own subdomain, if someone shows me a hack to get around it or an alternative URL, I'm very much all ears.

What link sharing sites do you read or use?

Comments

[happydork]

Here via /network -- as well as LJ, DW and Twitter, I use Delicious.

[matgb]

I need to go back and get Delicious to export in Unicode, then I'd use it all the time.

Also? Adding you, because, y'know...

[innerbrat]

The results of my poll was that no one gave a flying damn about buttons. And it's true; I never use tham myself 'cause they're awkward. I stick to browser buttons.

which is really just an excuse, because the buttons won't go with my layout and I'll have to design them all individually.

But having said that, Tumblr. You don't write about musuems or comics, but I'm unlikely to use it, but I still might, you dn't know.

[matgb]

24 people ticked they use the buttons though. I use them sometimes, and I have bookmarklets coming out of my ears. Given I had to teach SB what a bookmarklet was, for those less likely to comment, and/or using at work, they're a lot more useful I think.

For you, perhaps one button with a popup, sorta the way ShareThis works, but with a styled button?

(also? that icon is too distracting. She so purty)

[innerbrat]

Most of those popups have distinctive styles within the popup, though.

I shall have a think about it.

[matgb]

Theoretically, you can apply CSS to the popup. And in practice you can code your own from scratch if you can be bothered.

[innerbrat]

Dear Bob Kane, why are my comments on this thread the colour of snot?

[matgb]

It's the colour of your DW layout, I was playing. I was going to use your borders from the LJ layout, but they're fixed width.

You can do lots of very silly things with comment styles per user if you want to, I was hacking. I can even style your comments to look differently depending on where they are in a thread. Which is a bit weird.

I think your colour is the worst of those I've tried, might need to pick something a bit better though.

[innerbrat]

But my DW layout is fugly! It's there because I don't have the spoons to do another CSS layout right now, and I never look at my DW page anyway. I can't even finish Thagomizer.

[matgb]

I'll fix it to summat else later, and yeah, I know the feeling, for the first time in ages last few days I've been in the mood to code, and now I've got past the thing that wouldn't work (such a simple mistake, gah) I'm getting lots done.

Now I've got the buttons working, I can play with other things. Currently I'm working on page titles for tag pages (as requested), then move to working on this as a proper layout.

As well as a tutorial on applying small changes, like the buttons, to a layout without losing larger stuff and updates, theoretically can do it for LJ as well, but... You still on Flexible Square over there BTW?

[innerbrat]

I am, yes. Never bothered to change since installing it.

[matgb]

In which case I think I can write an override code for widgets and similar, so if you want a few buttons for your LJ layout, it's doable fairly easily, and as it's just overrides, you don't lose opther updates.

(this colour better? Nicked from a DW style page)

[innerbrat]

much better :D

[matgb]

Tumblr done. Which required setting up an account. Which means I have a Tumblr. I guess it's something else to play with at some point...

[innerbrat]

I just got your follow notification!

Follow http://museumsaregreat.tumblr.com too!

[innerbrat]

Also I'm not sure your Tumblr button works.

[matgb]

Yeah, if you use the bookmarklet, it resolves to that URL and works fine. But if you just go to that URL, it doesn't work.

So far, that's the only site I've found that appears to have deliberately stopped reverse engineering the bookmarklet to work with JS. Strange.

Ah well, I shall contact them.

[gwenhwyfaer]

"Copy link location" and ctrl-V, usually. Twice, if I'm going via is.gd for twitter.

[matgb]

So would an is.gd button be somethign you'd use?

Can do it easily:

[gwenhwyfaer]

Yes, it is. Thanks!

[azurelunatic]

I'm another Delicious user, but I rely on my own browser's button; Google Buzz is the new kid on the block.

It makes me so chirpily cheerful to see LJ and DW in one of those little button lists.

[matgb]

I knew it was doable for both ages back (nicked the code from that bookmarklet LJ has initially), but I've tweaked it a bit. It's possible to do it on pretty much any webform.

At some point I'll figure out a way of doing a complete formatted blogpost for people to click, I think I can do it with encoding some stuff, but not possible to do it in the buttons.

Buzz I'll look into, I never got into it but...

[matgb]

Gotit, I think.



To self: figure out how to get the Userpic into &imageurl=

[azurelunatic]

Hah, I remembered why I still had the comment notif in my inbox: so I would remember to suggest the OpenID provider buttonbox. Which I have now done.

[freddiefraggles]

I share stuff on Google reader. But then again, I read this blog in google reader. And LJ. Not sure why I haven't cut it from my lj reading list yet actually. Anyway, there you go.

You might want to look at how many times Facebook tells the world you've made a blogpost, by the way. It was three for this one.

[matgb]

Heh, I have you on both LJ and DW still, partially because you were for awhile using both separately.

Greader can't pick up on locked stuff though, right? If it's changed to support auth=digest that'd be really cool, but a bit of a privacy concern for some. Which means if I do post something locked you'd miss it?

And yeah, Twitter, new post, networked blogs. Bit overkill, will have to sort out which ones I want to keep.

[andrewhickey.info]

Yeah, Google Reader can't cope with friends-locked stuff. One reason why I spend so much less time on LJ/DW than a few years ago (Google Reader looks like something you could defend looking at in work time, whereas those don't)

[matgb]

Could very easily hack up a layout that looks like a professional news site you know. Might be an interesting challenge actually.

I've always used LJ and now DW as my main feedreader, hence making it as usable to me as possible. Of course, my layout'd never look like a work friendly site, but if you set it to persist your style everywhere, which theoretically works on DW now (bugfix went live this week)...

[innerbrat]

I've started getting tired with LJ as a feed reader because:

1) It means creating an account everytie I want to follow a feed, and that means coming up with a decent name.
2) It doesn't update regularly enough and sometimes I just get chunks of LibDemVoice post that is annoying.

Not interested in giving Google More information about my web browsing habits they could use against me when they turn evil, I'm giving Bloglines ago. If only adding feeds were easier, I'd recommend it. as it is, apparently you have to login in with captcha every time...

[matgb]

DW feedreading is a lot better, partially by design but I suspect partially because they actually want to amke it a one-stop-shop, there's talk of a complete overhaul at some point and making it dynamic, they're definitely going to make it so that the links (including my buttons) go to the original post if it declares a comment facility in the feed.

I never got on with Bloglines, tried it ages ago, so I gave up on such things. If you've got webspace and database space, there's a thing called Gregarious that I was going to use at one point, heard some very good things about it, it's sort of an open source Bloglines setup that you can keep to yourself. Importantly, it respects auth=digest, so you can read locked LJ/DW stuff on there...

[kake]

The Bloglines thing with logging in every time is fairly new — new enough that I haven't yet got around to mailing them and asking if it's intentional. It never used to do that.

[azurelunatic]

That's what one of my friends used to use LJ's Lanzelot sitescheme for. Nice and professional-looking.

[freddiefraggles]

What I do with Jennie's is look on her actual blog once a week or so to see if she's posted anything locked, but usually she mentions it in an unlocked post, so I go see. I do keep track of you all, somehow, though it is difficult :p

[kake]

I use Delicious, but not as a link-sharing site, rather as a way to store and categorise links to recipes for my own personal convenience. I used to use bit.ly as a link shortener before I gave up on using Twitter. I have on occasion browsed other people's bookmarks on Delicious, but I don't really do this any more since I started using an RSS reader for blogs. Never done it on bit.ly (I didn't actually know it was possible).

If I want to share a link right there and then, I copy-paste it into whichever IRC channel I think will appreciate it the most. Or if it's for a specific person, I email them — "I saw this and thought of you" is a nice excuse to drop someone a line. Otherwise, it's probably relevant to something I intend to post about in the future, so I copy-paste it into my notes for draft posts.

I don't mind "Share this" buttons on posts, as long as they aren't the kind that pop things up when I accidentally swipe my mouse across them.

[matgb]

Aye, can't stand accidentaly popup things, one of the things I'm working on is to make sure it's a limited, discreet number of little buttons that don't annoy, putting them with the rest of the interaction icons makes a lot of sense to me (although need to do some usability studies on that at some point).

I mostly used delicious for the linkpost export tool, but they won't export a post in unicode, and DW only supports Unicode, so I can't use it here, ergo less useful currently.

I put bitly down because it's what I use to share links on Twitter, ergo if I want to share something, I want to use Bitly. Might add Dabr on the same principle, but that'd be a bit much.

[kake]

Yeah, I have been wondering about adding such things to RGL, but the uncluttered design is one of the things I really like about it, so I'm unsure about whether to do it or not.

[matgb]

I guess it depends on where you want to put it and how you want it done. Most things can be styled to fit into any design, it's the clutter tradeoff that always annoys.

BTW, you can have either the tag in the page title, or have the recent page display head/subhead, for some reason I can't get both working, appears to be another bug, but if you want to have the tag displayed in the meantime, I'll sort the code out. Hopefully the bug is minor.

[kake]

Ah, I will be patient and wait until you've figured out the bug — thank you!

[andrewhickey.info]

Google reader. Occasionally Twitter via bit.ly

[matgb]

Hmm, I gave up on Greader very early on, it's good, but just not for me. So, is it possible to share to it from a site independently, or only through the feed?

I plan on figuring Buzz out, but Greader may be more of a challenge.

Ultimately, I need something that goes along the lines of service/?shareurl=URL&title=TITLE, ig Greader allows something like that, we're good.

[andrewhickey.info]

They have the 'note in Google reader' bookmarklet, which is a bunch of javascript:

?javascript:var%20b=document.body;var%20GR________bookmarklet_domain='http://www.google.com';if(b&&!document.xmlVersion){void(z%3Ddocument.createElement('script'));void(z.src%3D'http://www.google.com/reader/ui/link-bookmarklet.js');void(b.appendChild(z));}else{}

Don't know how much help that would be, but it could be some...

[matgb]

Wow.

I DLd the JS file that that little script calls. Ye gods that's massive. Every other service I've looked at has maybe 5 short lines at max. That's 41 long lines of rather dense options.

I think I may need to go look through their help files or ask someone at some point, can't use a script, has to be a plain URL, and that script isn't giving me anything to work with.

Thanks though.

[matgb]

Heh, if in doubt look at how AddThis does it.

[daweaver]

What major tools have I missed?

As mentioned upthread, Tumblr and Yahoodelicio.us. Don't know if Slashdot can be used for this kind of thing, I know that Metafilter won't. Bebo, anyone? Anyone? I assume that there are equivalents to Libdig for other affinity groups.

What link sharing sites do you read or use?

Me? Metafilter or bust. Usually bust.

It's your journal, design it for you, and if it's extensible so much the better.

Thanks for indirectly tipping off about get_clean_header: I don't know which maroon decided that all titles shalt be links, I've a rocket with their name on it...

[matgb]

Metafilter would make sense, yes. I assume there's a form to submit posts to, and that form would accept standard form submission stuff? The DW and LJ links in the buttons go direct to the update page and work fine, so it should be technically possible?

Personally, I like titles as links, it's very good for usability and is becoming standard practice; people are used to clicking a headline to read a story. It's also my preference. But you can strip it out fairly easily.

The scary thing with the DW style documentation is that it's patchy, sparse and not easy to follow, but in less than a year it's already far superior to what LJ managed in ten.

Slashdot is actually doable, and Bebo would be, but, y'know, Bebo does look like tumbleweed central these days. I might go look it up though, just for completeness, I've no doubt other DW users have accounts and/or readers there.

[freddiefraggles]

I like them a lot, your little icons :) they look really pro!

[matgb]

Plan is everyone can have them when I'm finished, just need to make it into a fully usable layer...

[red_trillium]

Hi,

I came this way via the post from firefoxfly at DW_Nifty. I've never learned html or css or anything like that but have been having fun playing with DW. Thank you for posting this so those of us who don't know anything can customise our journals!

[matgb]

No worries, as you can probably tell from my layout, I'm using all the tweaks myself, and I find writing it up helps me understand what I've done.

I actually learnt CSS in order to redo my old LJ layout, I'm now good enough that this layout, and a few others, were done by me from scratch, the amount you can do is impressive, at some point I'm going to do a zen garden layout just to scare people...