Nongeek perspective

Social Bookmarking is often used for attract traffic to blogs and the easiest way to get your articles on such services is to invite your visitors to submit their favorite stories directly. Then you should have a bookmark area in your blog, frequently at the foot of each article, and there are many ways to get this.

I think that the most effective way to accomplish bookmarking is simply to link to the submission URL. So, to have a "bookmarking bar" I just added a line linking to the proper URLs in the blog template:

Add to: <a href="Service-URL">Service</a>

where Service-URL is the URL to the service you want your visitors to submit the article.

Some URLs

The problem is that already exists a lot of bookmarking services and each one may have its own URL form. Here are what I know so far:

• del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/post?url=YOUR-ARTICLE-URL;title=YOUR-TITLE
• digg: http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=YOUR-ARTICLE-URL&title=YOUR-TITLE
• furl: http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=YOUR-ARTICLE-URL&t=YOUR-TITLE
• blinklist: http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=&Url=YOUR-ARTICLE-URL&Title=YOUR-TITLE
• netvouz: http://www.netvouz.com/action/submitBookmark?url=YOUR-ARTICLE-URL&title=YOUR-TITLE&description=
• shadows: http://www.shadows.com/features/tcr.htm?url=YOUR-ARTICLE-URL&title=YOUR-TITLE
  

YOUR-ARTICLE-URL is the address that appears in your browser when you're reading the article (i.e. the permanet link or permalink). YOUR-TITLE is the article's title. Notice that some services let you specify an optional description.

You may find URLs for many other services too.

Update: As John said in this comment, you can find an excellent resource here. Thanks John.

Putting it in your template

In blogger there are two template codes that refer to permalink and article title. So, if you don't use blogger beta you have to:

• Substitute YOUR-ARTICLE-URL by <$BlogItemPermalinkURL$> and
  
• substitute YOUR-TITLE by <$BlogItemTitle$>
  

For example. If you want a "Submit to del.icio.us" line you should add this to your template:

Submit to: <a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>;title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" >del.cio.us</a>

I added it just after the posts body (i.e. after <$BlogItemBody$>)

Read the blogger help for more information about editing your blog template and html syntax.

Final note

As I said before, there are many other ways to do this task. Take PopMarks, for instance. It's am awesome tool but it requieres javascript enabled, and some people have this feature disabled in their browsers.

Technorati tags: blog, blogger, bookmarks, howto
Add to: del.cio.us | digg | furl | blinklist | netvouz