Entries Categorized as 'AddThis'

Problems with the AddThis Social Bookmarking button and Permalinks

August 23, 2007

Originally I was using FeedBurner’s FeedFlare to add social bookmarking links to the bottom of my posts, but I noticed that my pages started taking much longer to load. I also noticed that the status bar read “transferring data from feedburner.com”. Hmmm… I wonder what could have caused my problem.

Looking around, I noticed that other blogs were using the AddThis button on their posts. It looked nice enough, and it seems to be all over the place, so readers should be familiar with it, and if they aren’t, its purpose is pretty obvious.

One problem though. When you click on it, the URL and title of the page you’re on is sent to addthis, not the permalink and title of the post that you’re on. This is fine if you’re in the archives, but not if you’re on the front page of your blog. If you’re on the front page, or root, of your blog, then it grabs your root URL and the Title of your blog.

I started looking around, and I found the WordPress Plugin (drop-down, Non-Drop-Down). Both of these widgets add the button to your posts automatically,and they send the Permalink of the post you’re reading, as well as that post’s title, to AddThis.

The only problem with the widget is that you don’t have a whole lot of control over where on the blog the widget appears. So I decided to poke around with the code snippet that they give you.

That is when I realized that this problem was all my fault. What happened is that when I was using the page that generates the code, I chose “On a Web Site”, which is the default, instead of “On a Blog”. It also helps if you choose your blogging platform correctly.

Step 1: Choose where you actually plan on using the code.