SnowBlog: The Snowball Factory Blog » wordpress plugin http://blog.snowballfactory.com Performance marketing for social media Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:10:38 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 New and Improved fbShare.me Button http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/10/26/new-and-improved-fbshare-me-button/ http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/10/26/new-and-improved-fbshare-me-button/#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:47:32 +0000 Jonathan http://blog.thesnowballfactory.com/?p=274 It’s been a little over a month since we first launched our sharecount button for Facebook and what a month it’s been. With very little promotion, our weekend coding project was quickly being served on over 5M pageviews per day. And now, Facebook has released an official version of their own.

As part of Facebook’s button release, they also announced a new API for pulling the share data directly from them. They were kind enough to give us a preview of this API, and we actually launched a new version of our button using the combined Facebook and awe.sm share data over the weekend. Here’s what’s new:

  • Uses combined share data from Facebook and awe.sm for the most complete stats
  • Cleaner look and slightly taller (9px) large button (it is now 53px wide by 69px tall)
  • Ability to customize the background and text colors of the badge in the large button
  • When there are no shares, the badge in the large button is clickable as a sharing interface

We also upgraded our WordPress Plugin to accommodate these changes and include some user requests:

  • Support color customization in plugin
  • Added the ability to disable the button from appearing on Pages (vs Posts)
  • Improved plugin performance by eliminating javascript

At this point, our version of the button is primarily targeted at existing awe.sm publishers. But, there are a few reasons other folks might want to use it over the Facebook version:

Please let us know if you have ideas on how we can make the button even more useful.

]]> http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/10/26/new-and-improved-fbshare-me-button/feed/ 5 Testing the new Twitter Publisher WP Plugin http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/06/11/testing-the-new-twitter-publisher-wp-plugin/ http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/06/11/testing-the-new-twitter-publisher-wp-plugin/#comments Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:45:05 +0000 Jonathan http://blog.thesnowballfactory.com/?p=227 WP plugin developer Timan Rebel just launched a new WP plugin called Twitter Publisher, which is a great way to automatically tweet new blog posts when they are published.

Twitter Publisher supports both bit.ly and awe.sm to shorten the links going to Twitter, and it will even add Google Analytics campaign parameters to the bit.ly links for you (awe.sm does this automatically ;-) ). But the coolest feature IMHO is the ability to give the author of the post credit in the tweet. This is great for larger blogs with multiple authors. However if you’re just rolling solo, it’s not a huge advantage over Twitterfeed (which also supports awe.sm :-) ).

We’re gonna test it out on this blog to see how it works, but probably stick with Twitterfeed on my personal blog for now.

Update: It looks like there are still some bugs in the Twitter Publisher plugin, specifically it is ignoring the setting to use awe.sm and using bit.ly instead. We’ve alerted Timan, and hopefully he will release a fix soon.

Update 2: The plugin should be working correctly now.

]]> http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/06/11/testing-the-new-twitter-publisher-wp-plugin/feed/ 0 Suggest to Techmeme button for WordPress http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/02/04/suggest-to-techmeme-button-for-wordpress/ http://blog.snowballfactory.com/2009/02/04/suggest-to-techmeme-button-for-wordpress/#comments Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:27:00 +0000 Jonathan http://blog.thesnowballfactory.com/?p=119 As noted in the (several updates to the) original post, the javascript code I wrote for the ‘Suggest to Techmeme’ button won’t work when inserted into posts on self-hosted instances of WordPress (unless you have the Exec-PHP plugin installed, like I do on my personal blog). There is already a very popular plugin for adding sharing calls to action to your blog posts called Sociable, and it happens to be very easily extensible.

So, I just created a custom version of the Sociable plugin that includes ‘Techmeme’ as an option (you can see it in action on my personal blog — it’s under the Share This widget at the bottom of each post). For those of you running self-hosted WordPress blogs, just download my version of the plugin here and install and activate it as you would any normal plugin. Then, go into Settings>Sociable and check ‘Techmeme’. That’s it!

A few requests have been made to include URL shortening functionality into the button, and I’ve got a few ideas I’m going to send to Joost, the guy who maintains the Sociable plugin. Maybe we can come up with something cool together. Stay tuned… ;-)

Again, for those of you who missed it:

DOWNLOAD THE WORDPRESS PLUGIN HERE

If you have no idea what this is all about, read up on Techmeme’s new suggest via Twitter functionality on TechCrunch or the Techmeme blog.

Suggest to?

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