Getting Sociable

Until now, I had been using the Tweet This! and Share This! plug-ins to encourage sharing of posts, and I’m working on getting the Facebook “Like” button installed, so I might switch my Facebook Connect plug-in, too.

This morning I stumbled across a sharing plug-in that I like a lot more than the other two, and I think it makes for a nicer look. It’s called Sociable, and while it supposedly hasn’t been tested for the latest version of WordPress, it seems to be working well.

I like that it lets me choose from among 99 different sharing sites and methods (including email) in one toolbar, and that you can customize both the heading (so I could call out Twitter, Facebook and E-Mail among the options) and the order of the icons.

Here’s a screen shot of all 99 services (click to enlarge):

The ability to customize your blog with plug-ins like this is one of the main advantages of a self-hosted WordPress blog, as opposed to using WordPress.com. Still, WordPress.com is a great way to get your blog started quickly, and you can use domain mapping on WordPress.com to ensure continuity, so that if you decide later to move to self-hosted (as I did with SMUG), you don’t lose your external links.

If you’re using self-hosted WordPress, you might want to get Sociable too…and use the buttons below to share this post with your friends.

Blogging 369: Adding an Audio Player in WordPress

As you can see in the post about Sharing Mayo Clinic being featured on FIR, it’s possible in the self-hosted version of WordPress to provide a Flash player for your mp3 files, which enables your users to listen to the audio track without downloading it and opening in another program, such as iTunes.

What you may not know is that it’s really easy to provide this functionality.

Continue reading “Blogging 369: Adding an Audio Player in WordPress”