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WordPress Plugin: Socialize Me!
Tuesday, 22 January 2008 — by Wayne Smallman
Making the most of Social Media & Social Networking is the goal of just about every ‘blogger. Imagine if you could reach out to all those visitors from StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious et cetera, right from your articles…
Socializing your ‘blog
Converting the traffic to your ‘blog is only part of the challenge. Other than your ‘blog feed, how else do you connect with those visitors?
Simply hoping that they’ll click on one or maybe two of your social profiles is more haphazard than hopeful.
Imagine one of your articles has been submitted to StumbleUpon. You’re getting a steady stream of visitors to your ‘blog. You could really connect with some of these guys — if you knew who they were.
Well here’s the thing, with Socialize Me! those visitors to your ‘blog will see a simple message when they arrive: “Hi, thanks for the visit! Wayne’s on StumbleUpon, too!” with a link to your profile.
With the Socialize Me! Plugin for WordPress you can connect with people on services like: StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Pownce, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace and many, many more.
All you do is add in your profiles and usernames and let my Socialize Me! Plugin do the rest. It’s that simple.
For a working demonstration pay a visit to the Review on StumbleUpon for this article and then click the title link back to this ‘blog.
Installing & Configuring the Socialize Me! Plugin for WordPress
Requirements: a hosted version of WordPress 2.3 or above and FTP access.
Installation: if you’re a seasoned ‘blogger, then the installation is very easy — just download the Socialize Me! Plugin, uncompress the file (if your system doesn’t do that for you) and upload the file into the Plugins folder on your server.
For those who’re new or less familiar with WordPress, a Plugin installation guide for WordPress might be what you’re looking for.
Configuration:
- Pay a visit to your WordPress account and sign-in to your Dashboard.
- Click on the Options tab.
- Click on the “Socialize Me!” tab on the sub-menu.
- Enter your usernames, IDs and profiles into the relevant fields.
- Add the code
into your “single.php” page (see figure 1, or click here for the code) — you’re free to place the code where you like!
Figure 1 — code sample placed below the page header.
I’ve added a supporting CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) to allow you to customize the Plugin however you see fit.
Known Issues: there’s an issue with the chevron background images not showing up in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 & 7, which is being investigated.
Support
If you have any questions about this Plugin, you can post your comments on the Socialize Me! Discussion Board over on the official ‘blog Facebook Page.
Future developments
- Support for multi-author ‘blogs.
- A flexible set of options for styling and positioning the reminder object.
- Convert the code from procedural to Object-Oriented PHP.
- Possible support for direct messaging to certain services (such as Facebook or StumbleUpon, for example).
- Support for more services, as they become more popular, or are suggested by you!
A plea from the author
I really hope you find this Plugin useful. I also hope it spurs those of you with the requisite PHP skills to maybe take things a step further.
What would be really appreciated is if we could share the efforts and try to make Socialize Me! a really good Plugin for everyone to enjoy.
So with that in mind, with the spirit of Open Source in mind, all I ask is that if you do something novel with the Plugin, let me know and we can all then benefit from your ideas.
Then everyone who chooses to contribute gets the mention they deserve and we don’t confuse everyone with competing versions of the same Plugin.
Copyright 1999-2008 Wayne Smallman, Octane Interactive Limited. Socialize Me! is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL)
« Apple TV gets bad reception — The future of Social Networks »
Congratulations on the new plugin Wayne! I’ve Stumbled the page and written a short review on Sciencetext.com
Good luck with it
db