By this weekend I hope to have a new version of the diggIntegrator plugin up and running for everyone. While that release date moves closer I thought I'd offer up a little code snippet for anyone interested in including the new Digg Buttons without adding a plugin.
One of the major downsides Digg's newest implementation is the lack of a "not dugg" state. You basically just get a digg counter set to 0 until your post is submitted and dugg - that's why the diggIntegrator plugin is so nice. Now, if you're ok with the 0 count then there's a quick way to get the JavaScript up and running without a plugin - here's how it works.
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I've had alot of hits coming in from Google which are searching for "Custom GamerCards." The post which covers this topic is mainly about adding a custom image to your GamerCard, I'm not sure this is what people are looking for specifically, so I thought I'd add a quick link to a couple sites which offer "Custom GamerCards" to add to your blog.
Custom GamerCard Services
Currently I use MyGamerCard.net as you can see on my "About" page. If you're interested in sharing your GamerCard on MySpace you'll need to use one of the services which creates an image file - JavaScript or Flash won't make it through their filters.
Over on PopSciBlog (the Popular Science Blog), which is suprisingly on TypePad, there's an interesting post concerning a recent occurence on Flickr. This post, "Flickr, Blogmobs, and a Seriously Fascinating Lesson on Content Licensing", details a recent event concerning a person who was caught plagiarizing photos from Flickr.
I highly recommend giving it a read if you've ever wondered about the power of a CC license, content theft, and the power of (what PopSciBlog calls) a blogmob. Needless to say, you'll come away from the post very interested in getting one of the many CC licenses available at the Creative Commons site.
About a week ago, Arne Brachold wrote an interesting piece on creating links to social bookmark services. If you're looking to add buttons, or text links, which help users submit your posts to these bookmarking services you may want to give it a look.
One thing Arne doesn't mention, though, is how to get WordPress to do this automatically - something that is pretty popular. If you look towards the top of my article pages (pages where comments are available) you'll see an example of how I integrate these services.
Anyway - to get WordPress doing this automatically you really only need to use two of WordPress' Loop tags. One that pulls the pages URL, or permalink, and one that pulls the title. Just remember that these need to be placed inside the WordPress loop somewhere in order to work.
Helpful Loop Tags
<?php the_permalink(); ?>
//This function calls the post's URL
<?php the_title(); ?>
//This function calls the post's Title
If you look at Arne's code you'll simply replace the [URL] and the [TITLE] text with the appropriate functions above. These will form the 'href' value of your link, from there just add either an icon for the service or simply the text - just like any hyperlink.
Oh, one more thing - I recommend encoding the '&' by replacing each occurrence with '&' - this will make sure it validates cleanly.
When I first started doing my own WordPress themes, and specifically started including AdSense code, I wanted to offset my posts to mix things up a bit. Here on bill2me.com's frontpage you can see an example in the Flickr code included between the two posts on the page. While offsetting posts can provide some interesting options for inserting special elements, entrepreneurial bloggers will also note that the space between posts can be good for placing ads. Of course the problem here is that you can't JUST place the code into the WordPress loop - because it'll force the code to repeat every time the loop iterates. (This can result in too many occurrences of your AdSense code on a single page and be problematic when considering the AdSense TOS.) With a little modification though you can get things working. Read the Rest of this post
