All the rage

A new web 2.0 trend that I’ve been a bit slow to catch up on has been social bookmarking … but I’ve made up for it now by placing links on all my sites.

Everywhere you go these days, you’ll see these funny little icons at the bottom of the page.

Social bookmarking allows you to get your site stored in someone’s favourites collection, but more importantly it allows other people to see these favourites and then – hopefully – start clicking on your links.

To get a feel for how extensive the list is, take a look at this list of service providers from Wikipedia.

addthis to your favourites

I’ve discovered a great free service which allows you to capitalise on many of these social bookmarking sites with just one bit of code.

It’s called addthis.com and it provides generic and custom code for ‘share’ links on your webpages.

It also offers analytics, with the following information:

» Most Popular Content
» Where Your Content is Sent
» Trends Over Time
» Geographic Breakdown

The icon below shows what it looks like on your site … hold your mouse over the icon to see what it does:

And now for the science …

The code, which is easily generated via the addthis.com website, looks like this:

<!– ADDTHIS BUTTON BEGIN –>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
addthis_logo_background = ‘EFEFFF’;
addthis_logo_color      = ’666699′;
addthis_brand           = ‘scotbystation.co.uk’;
addthis_options         = ‘favorites, email, digg, delicious, myspace, facebook, google, live, more’;
</script>
<a href=”http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php” onmouseover=”return addthis_open(this, ”, ‘[URL]‘, ‘[TITLE]‘)” onmouseout=”addthis_close()” onclick=”return addthis_sendto()”><img src=”http://s9.addthis.com/button1-share.gif” width=”125″ height=”16″ border=”0″ alt=”" /></a>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://s7.addthis.com/js/152/addthis_widget.js”></script>
<!– ADDTHIS BUTTON END –>

Where to addthis

I’ve used this in different ways on my websites, and I’ve been pleased to find that I can also hack php templates to include the ‘share’ buttons on my more complex sites.

For instance, expatchat.co.uk is a straightforward, Dreamweaver authored website and I’ve just added the ‘addthis’ button code to the Dreamweaver template so it shows up on every page.

Please take a moment to comment below.