Share button for WordPress.com blogs – the easier way

April 13th, 2009

For years WordPress.com publishers have been clamoring to get a social bookmarking button properly integrated on their blogs. We’re very aware that people have gone to great lengths to get AddToAny’s share button inserted below their posts. Minh of Digital Citizen wrote a fantastically thorough post recently on how to place AddToAny in WordPress.com posts. We’ve since shared Minh’s guide with inquiring WordPressers from all over the world. As Minh acknowledges, the process is pretty involved, and not to detract from his great tutorial (thank you again, Minh!), but we thought about ways to make it easier. Today we are officially sharing the easiest option yet: a share button inserter for WordPress.com.

Get your Share Button Inserter bookmarklet now!

With Share button integration, your readers and visitors have access to every relevant sharing and bookmarking service (including email) and you never have to worry about maintenance, upgrades, etc. Here’s an example share button that was actually inserted into this post with the WP.com Share Button inserter!:

Doing this yourself is a breeze. If you happen to have the WordPress “Press It” button, you’ll feel right on home installing your inserter. In most browsers (sans Internet Explorer), you’ll simply drag the “bookmarklet” (so it’s called) onto your browser’s link toolbar. (Internet Explorer’s just a little different though directions are available.) From there, the process is simple. You’ll publish a post, press the WP.com Share Button you installed and bam — Share button is inserted and you have successfully enabled social bookmarking on your post! Save changes and you’re done.

Get your AddToAny inserter here.

WordPressers, we hope you like this. Please do let us know what you think!

Update: Choose your own WordPress.com share button! Thanks to everyone for the request!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 8:30 am.

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Digital Citizen

This is so awesome! I LOVE IT!

I have posted something to notify others of the fact, linking to here, of course. As well, I have updated the old post to add a "SEVERELY OUTDATED" notice in the first line of text and linking here. I only leave it there because the search engines might still turn it up in searches.

Thanks for the absolutely awesome work!

Minh

Digital Citizen

Btw, will WordPress be putting this in one of their "corporate" posts about new features and happenings for the platform? They've got to! This is like a killer app for them!

Sorry to be posting twice. Just had this thought later. :-)

اس ام اس

thank you for support

Janice

This is fantastic. Super easy. I'm actually shocked because I'm so not technical. I know this is very new, and not to be picky, but will we be able to select which button to use in the future?

Pat

Excellent feature request! This is on the to-do, and will probably require you grab a new bookmarklet.

Pat

Write your comment here...

Pat

Thank you again, Minh! I definitely share your enthusiasm. Awesome update, btw:
http://digitalcitizen.ca/2009/04/13/easy-one-clic...

Charlotte

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I have been hoping for something easy like this for a while. So far, so good!

indri

Thank you Friends ... To find it, I am very happy to be able to visit your blog, a lot of good information
interesting, I hope we can share information...

EGIPT

Thanks. This button is amazing for me.

Digital Citizen

In Wordpress, they have stats on what people click on. If they click on your button, in the Clicks stats listing, your URL shows up, followed by the URL of the post. Unfortunately, that means that every clicked post looks the same on that list, ending in http://%... Is there a way that in the next upgrade, you could change the URL to the post title so that one doesn't have to mouse over the clicked AddToAny button link to see the full URL in the bottom bar of the browser to know what post it came from? Your button before this switch over did that. Thank you.

Ray

Pat - Much appreciate the comment you left on my site earlier... Some good information and clarification of what my thought already were in general.

Greg

Why does it automatically inserted the VERY large version of the share bar... it looks horrible and dwarfs the text post.

Jack

When will this be ready to go??!!!

Greg

I second that question...

Pat

Really good question, thanks. It was a quick UI decision based on the buttons we have available right now. The standard 171 x 16px button includes drop-down arrows, but this WordPress.com button is not drop-down enabled (WP.com limitation). The bigger button does not have these drop-down arrow indicators so we went with it.

Great feedback though. I think offering bookmarklets with a custom button would be ideal. Get in touch if you'd like to have your bookmarklet insert a button of your choice. Shouldn't be hard. Thanks, Greg!

Pat

I third that quest -- what -- okay fine I'm on it. Soon!

Rachael

I seem to be encountering problems using your bookmarklet.

I'd really like to use your share button in my wordpress.com blog as soon as possible. As a workaround, could you tell me the code which I can manually add (and edit) to my individual posts? Thanks in advance.

OK back to your WP.com Share Button bookmarklet. I tried with Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox without success.

For Chrome and Firefox, I can move the inserter to the browser toolbar.

For Internet Explorer, this was not possible (as you mentioned). I eventually placed it under 'Favorites'. BTW, on one of your web pages you mentioned that you provided directions on how to insert your bookmarklet for Internet Explorer. However, I could not find these directions anyway even after googling and searching the web.

To test your bookmarklet, I used the standard 'Hello World' post provided by wordpress.com, which had already been published but changed from public to private. For all 3 browsers, after going to Editing for this post and pressing your bookmarklet, nothing is inserted anywhere in the post. After updating the post, the post did not display your share button.

Help! I really want to use your bookmarklet the easy way.

Pat

Hi Rachael,

I just did the same thing on my own WP.com blog with the first default "Hello world!" post. It worked for me though

Steps I took:
* Went to edit my private "Hello world!" post
* Waited for the page to fully load (this is key!)
* Clicked the bookmarklet

Once you click the bookmarklet, you should see it appear instantly at the bottom of the editing box, right at the end of your post.

Another note: the bookmarklet relies on the Permalink, which should appear right below the post title in editing mode.

Let us know how it goes, and feel free to get in touch directly: http://www.addtoany.com/contact/

Pat

Hi Rachael,

I just did the same thing on my own WP.com blog with the first default "Hello world!" post. It worked for me though

Steps I took:
* Went to edit my private "Hello world!" post
* Waited for the page to fully load (this is key!)
* Clicked the bookmarklet

Once you click the bookmarklet, you should see it appear instantly at the bottom of the editing box, right at the end of your post.

Another note: the bookmarklet relies on the Permalink, which should appear right below the post title in editing mode.

Let us know how it goes, and feel free to get in touch directly: http://www.addtoany.com/contact/

Add to Any Blog

Share button for WordPress.com blogs – the easier way

Get your Share Button Inserter bookmarklet now!