Friday, February 1, 2008

Earn your Sharing Badge

The social bookmarking / sharing bug has arrived at our front door.

During a Patient Power meeting, someone suggested that we add del.ici.ous links to the event pages as a way for users to share their content with friends. Great idea! We had planned on making book mark links available on the page anyway, so no one took issue with the idea. We looked at our options and picked a badge style that would fit well with the look of our page, and this was done.

A few months later, Adi Espat stopped by and asked if we could add digg or other social sharing badges to her awareness page. Great idea, but then the fear set in. As this desire grows will our site begin to look more like an ad farm for social media sites, than an information source for patients, physicians and their families.

That is when I discovered Share this. Share this is a one icon tool that allows you to choose what sharing sites you offer to your readers, within a little expandable window. You can also choose to send your content via email. So instead of putting links to digg, delicious, facebook, newsvine, technorati... and every other think you can think of, we can just drop this one snippet of code onto the page and BAM! you've got it all.



The draw back? It is javascript, and as everyone who works on sites here knows, you cannot add .js in our cms when you are working in IE.

So to get it into your page you have to publish your page, then go back and open it in Firefox, or Netscape, then put the code in at the end of the page and close. Do not go back and preview... It WILL break the code. It is the same process you have to do if you put in streaming video, or a poll.

If you want more info, or you want to give it a try, just let me know. I will can give you the snippet of code, and walk you through placing it in, if you need help.

I gave the code to Darcy this morning, you I think you might see the Share this badge in this month's issue of
Cancerwise.
If you do, try it out and let me know what you think?

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