Make your blog posts ‘taggable’

Many people now use online bookmarks to file sites they want to review later. Among the most popular services are del.icio.us, Furl, Spurl and Yahoo My Web 2.0.

Many of these services require you to install a tool bar or a shortcut tab in your browser in order to save bookmarks and tag these with keywords for organization. By putting shortcut buttons for tagging your posts in these services, you will encourage blog readers to file your article for reading and re-reading later.

To put these buttons in your WordPress blog, just copy the codes below and paste these into your theme’s template. I used to have these buttons display after the post titles in the index page but it looked too crowded and I decided in having it in the individual posts page. I placed the codes after the <?php the_title(); ?> part in the post template and before <?php the_content(); ?>. If you want to display these buttons after the article, then paste the code snippets after <?php the_content(); ?>

Yahoo My Web 2.0
This code was released by Yahoo Publisher Network. If you check the site, there are additional codes for customizing colors and Blog via Yahoo! 360 and Print buttons. Yahoo My Web 2.0, by the way, was rated higher than del.icio.us in this PC Magazine article.

<script language="javascript" src="http://sm.feeds.yahoo.com/Buttons/V1.0/yactions.js"></script>
<script language="javascript">
yactions.buildButton( 'save', 'My_Web' );
</script>

Del.icio.us
This code came with my WordPress theme. I just transferred it before the article and added a del.icio.us icon.

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php echo htmlentities(the_title()); ?>">Bookmark at del.icio.us</a>

For Spurl and Furl, I knew that by following the construction of the del.icio.us bookmark in my theme, I could find a way to create a link to a submission button for the two services, I just needed the link to the submission URL.

In my search for that link, I saw the submission buttons after the articles in LiewCF.com‘s site. One of his readers asked him how he did it and he said it was a new plugin that he’s still writing. I figured that I wouldn’t need the plugin and just viewed the source of his bookmarks. I copied the submission URLs of the two services and pasted the part of the code containing the WordPress permalink and it worked. I tested the buttons and these actually worked.

Spurl
<a href="http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php echo htmlentities(the_title()); ?>">Spurl it</a>

Furl
<a href="http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php echo htmlentities(the_title()); ?>">Furl it</a>

If you want an icon displayed before the service, just use the code for displaying images:
<img src="http://location of image/furl.gif" alt="Furl it or Spurl it or Tag at del.icio.us" />

Support this blog and independent reporting on Cebu

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *