Version 0.2 released:
- You can show Facebook, Twitter, Google +1 and LinkedIn buttons. (You can pick which buttons to display.)
- Display the buttons either vertically or horizontally.
- Set the vertical location in your content at 1/3 way down, in the middle, 2/3 way down, or at the top or the bottom or at BOTH the top and bottom.
- Display the like buttons either on the right or left side of the page or post.
- Enter your Twitter ID so it will be automatically included at the end of the tweet being sent.
- Not show like buttons on any pages or posts by listing the WordPress id’s of the ones you want to exclude.
Click here to see a screen shot of the plugin options page that you’ll see in your WordPress admin panel.
Click here to see a screen shot of how the buttons look when you choose to display them vertically, one above the other.
More Information:
It’s becoming clear that Social Bookmarking and the use and exposure that can be gained on Twitter and Facebook is becoming more and more important. And being ‘liked’ is turning out to be a ‘necessary’ thing. Even Google has joined the ‘like-ing’ club with their new +1 button and it seems that having Like buttons on your pages is something we all should be doing.
More and more people are adding Like Buttons to their sites.
I was reading a post on Paul Forcey’s The Newbie Helper blog when I noticed that he was using the new Google +1 button along with buttons for Twitter and Facebook. This is something I have been meaning to add to my sites, but had kept putting off. Seeing the like buttons on Paul’s site made me decide that I was going to modify one of the themes that I use for a number of my sites so I could show the like buttons on all my posts and pages.
As I got into it I saw that I really needed some options to make displaying the buttons a little easier. I wanted to show the ‘like’ buttons down more toward the middle or the end of the page or post. Not at the top.
My thinking was that people probably won’t click on the buttons if they don’t actually read the post. And now with longer posts and pages becoming de rigueur, if they actually get into reading the entire article they will be scrolling down the page and not see the buttons when they are done. But I also didn’t want to put the like buttons at the very bottom, which seems to me to be too far down the page to catch any ‘click-happy’ readers.
A new plugin is created.
So I decided to code it as a plugin with a few options to make it easier to use on different types of sites. I know there are a lot of other plugins out there that we can use to add like buttons and other gadgets, but I wanted to write a plugin that was as small and lean as possible in order to keep the page loading speed up. That’s one of the reasons I usually modify a theme rather than using a plugin since it cuts down on added overhead. But this plugin is small. Tiny, even. It just does the thing I want which is automatically putting like buttons on every page and post without having to manually go in and change each one.
In the process of writing the plugin, I’ve used it on a half dozen sites now and I do like the results. And while adding the like buttons doesn’t seem to slow down the page load appreciably, the Google +1 is the one that seems to take the longest to load.
No demo needed. It’s right on this page.
Unlike other plugins, I haven’t made a demo page because you can see the like button in action right here on any page of the site. Be sure to test the buttons out by +1’ing me for our good friends at Google, or Tweeting this page to give me some additional exposure, or liking me on Facebook. We all want to be liked, don’t we? (How’s that for a shameless plug?)
Seriously, to see how the plugin works, just click around on any of the pages here on this site. One the pages without a lot of content (most of them..lol) the buttons still seem to display fairly well.
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