I was checking my blog stats recently when I noticed that some people had entered my blog via del.icio.us (or delicious as it’s now known!). I then remembered that I still hadn’t got round to adding the ShareThis option to my blog which I had intended to do when we re-designed it.This post outlines how I have added the options to share directly from the Joeyanne Libraryanne blog or from the feed viewed in a feed reader.

Sharing from the blog

ShareThis enables readers to share interesting posts with their social media or with particular people they think may be interested. As the eagle-eyed of you may have noticed, I have now added ShareThis which you can see at the bottom of this post (if you’re viewing it on the blog).

I installed the ShareThis WordPress plugin and then registered with ShareThis so that I could customise it. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to customise. I decided to use the options for saving to social web services (such as delicious, Google Bookmarks, Facebook, Friendfeed and Digg), posting to other services (including Facebook, Twitter and other blogs) and e-mailing to others:

The interface is really nice to use and it’s very easy to adapt from the admin side too. I’ve checked in the admin panel this morning and am pleased to see that it has already been used to e-mail posts to others, save to delicious, Google bookmarks, and Facebook and also to post to another WordPress blog.

Sharing from the feed

This is all well and good but what about the majority of blog readers who rarely actually visit the blog site and read posts via a feed reader? I was hoping ShareThis would show up on the feed but sadly it doesn’t, however I noticed that Pegasus Librarian amongst others had the option to share from the feed. Closer inspection showed me that people were using FeedBurner to create these options for them. I am already a user of FeedBurner (it manages my e-mail subscriptions), but hadn’t realised it had this option. I have since enabled this feature (called FeedFlare for others who weren’t aware of this) so if you are reading this via a feed reader you should see the options to e-mail this post, save to delicious, or share on Facebook:

Seeing as I am a supposed supporter of “Web 2.0″ it’s taken me a long time to enable the “social web” aspects of Joeyanne Libraryanne. However, with these two options, there’s no excuse for not sharing my blog posts now! There are certain ShareThis options I didn’t select (otherwise the box almost filled the screen!), but if you use a certain service that you would like to see added to the list of options please let me know in the comments.

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