ShareThis a wordpress plugin to easify your blog
post sharing on social networks
etworks For a few days now, I'm looking through my blog and
checking how can I improve the way it to be more convenient for my
readers.
By so far I've been using the
Share On Facebook wordpress
plugin and custom build twitter button as the only aims to share my
blog posts online.
As nowdays people are using more and more diversified networks and
facebook adn twitter are not the only social places on the net, I
found it would be handy if I have a bit more options for sharing my
blog info online.
After a quick google search I stumbled upon a wordpress plugin
which was created with the goal of sharing articles to most of the
major social networks and websites.
I hope this plugin will have improve my blog's usability and in the
same time allow my readers to easily share the articles which
appealed to them.
The plugin in question is called
ShareThis and can be
straight found in the repository of wordpress extensions on
wordpress.org's website.
The supported shares by the
Share-This plugin are as
follows:
1. Share on Facebook
2. Share on Twitter
3. Share on Google Buzz
4. Share on Blogger.com
5. Share in Digg
6. Share in AIM Share
7. Share in Stumbleupon
8. Share on Microsoft Messanger
The
Share-This wp plugin is able to place automatically it's
share buttons on the top of your blog posts and pages, it could be
also easily customized to look a bit different from what it's by
default.
Here is a screenshot on how the plugin looks after it is installed
and configured on a wordpress powered blog;
The
Share-This extensions version which I have gave a try is
4.0.4 and it appeared to work correctly on my wordpress
installation ver. 3.1.
Even though officially on the plugin website it's being stated that
the plugin is compatible up to a wordpress ver. 3.0.5 it worked
just fine on my 3.1 ;)
So it's a good news for users of the latest wordpress releases that
the plugin should work like a charm.
In order to install and configure the plugin I've followed
literally the plugin installation instructions:
1. Download and unzip the ShareThis extension
linux:/var/www/blog# wget
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/share-this.zip
linux:/var/www/blog# cd wp-content/plugins
linux:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# unzip share-this.zip
...
After it's succesfully extracted, next step is to,
2. Login to your wordpress administration and enable
it
From the admin panel go to;
Plugins -> Inactive -> ShareThis
3. Configure the ShareThis plugin before you Activate
it
Press the:
Plugins -> Inactive -> ShareThis -> Configuration
options are here
Choose your desired plugin options and press the Update
ShareThis Options button.
4. Activate the Share-This extensions
Plugins -> Inactive -> ShareThis ->
Activate
Whoohoo now your blog installation is equipped with the trendy
Share-This buttons and your users will be able easily to share
online their favourite posts.
Apart from it's user usefulness I believe the ShareThis wp
button should also be a very good choice in terms of SEO! as it
will possibly attract some more users to your blog from the users
that might take the step to use the ShareThis button and share on
the major social networks.
Having in mind the versatile usefullness of the plugin I think
every serious blogger should think about installing and using the
nice plugin.
I'm quite curious if the plugin will have effect on my blog
attendance, if I'm right my blog's visitors should leap in the
coming weeks.
Let's wait and see :)