I Love Social Bookmarking is a simple WordPress plugin that allows your readers to submit your content to social media services via a clutter-free drop-down list of attractive icons.

What are social media services?

If you’ve not heard of social media sites such as Digg or del.icio.us you should get to know them. They allow Internet users to save and rank web pages that they find interesting and share them with their friends and other users. When your content gets shared with others this can potentially generate huge levels of traffic for your blog. Just what you want, right?

How is ILSB different?

There are other social media plugins that do a similar job. ILSB aims to keep things as simple as possible for both you and your readers, to run with minimal system resources, and to look good whilst she’s at it. The plugin features attractive icons provided by FastIcon.com, is easily customisable to fit your blog’s theme, is XHTML standards-compliant and is SEO optimised by using the “nofollow” tag.

Which social media services are supported?

Currently supported: Blinklist, Blogmarks, Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Ma.gnolia, NewsVine, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Technorati. More to come soon!

Download

• Download Share the Love 0.3.2 (Released 7 March 2008)

If upgrading from a previous version, you may need to hit the “Reset Defaults” button to initialise all the new features and options.

Installation

1. Unzip the download file and upload the i-love-social-bookmarking folder into your WordPress plugins directory. (eg /wp-content/plugins/i-love-social-bookmarking/ )
2. From the Plugins page of your WordPress administration panel click ‘activate’ for I Love Social Bookmarking.

Administrator options

From your WordPress administration panel (under Options > I Love Social Bookmarking) the following options are available:

• Automatic or manual display – select whether to have I Love Social Bookmarking automatically inserted at the end of each post or whether to manually insert it into your template files. If manual use the following code:<?php if (function_exists(‘ilsb’)){ilsb();} ?>
• Select WordPress pages – Select which WordPress page types on which the plugin will automatically be placed.
• Select social media services – Select which social media services you would like to include
• List title – A string of text that will be used alongside the Love icon
• List style – Horizontal or vertical
• Background colour – The hexadecimal colour of the background of the list
• Link anchor – Whether or not to display the name of the social media service
• Font – The font face to be used
• Font size – The font size to be used
• Link target – Option to force the links to open in a new window

Version History

• 7 October 2007 – Version 0.1b – Pre-release trial version
• 9 October 2007 – Version 0.1.2 – Fixed bug affecting WP2.3 users viewing admin options
• 10 October 2007 – Version 0.1.3 – Streamlined PHP
• 13 October 2007 – Version 0.2
  • Added option to select which on WordPress page types the plugin is displayed
  • Added option to force links to open in new window
  • Added social media serviced: Bloglines and Facebook
  • Fixed bug causing conflicts with other plugins, including WP-Tables plugin
  • Streamlined PHP
• 16 October 2007 – Version 0.2.1 – Fixed minor bugs affecting users with WordPress installed in folder other than root folder, and CSS conflict with some themes.
• 28 October 2007 – Version 0.2.2 – Fixed bug affecting non-WordPress 2.3 installations when using search function.
• 2 March 2008 – Version 0.3 – Major rewrite of the hover-over effect using JavaScript. Should eradicate many of the minor CSS bugs/browser-discrepancies.
• 6 March 2008 – Version 0.3.1 – Bug tweak fixing minor display issue in Internet Explorer.
• 7 March 2008 – Version 0.3.2 – Background colour bug fix.

License

I Love Social Bookmarking is released under the GNU General Public License. This means the software is free to use, redistribute and modify. Happy days!

If you like ILSB please write about it on your blog and send a link my way.