Today I have added functionality to this site and to Darren Kenny Paralympic Cyclist that makes it easier for visitors to share the love and add links on facebook, email to friend or just plain blog about it.
A little research showed that there were two main sites offering tools to enable this; AddThis and ShareThis. Both have JavaScript that can be added to a page to include a sharing button, both allow some customisation and both can provide user stats. In the end I went with ShareThis for one simple reason, this site was up.
The original plan was to test one tool on each site, leave them running for a month or so and compare results. I had registered with both sites earlier in the week as I had wanted to look at the JavaScript and the options available. When I went to AddThis there was no indication on the home page that they were performing maintenance, nothing in the blog and they hadn't emailed me. You just get a simple unstyled page telling you to come back later when you go to your account.
To add the button was easy
- Register on ShareThis
- Get button code
- Create a Module template called ShareThis
- Copy code into template and save
Go to the Entry template and include the ShareThis module where you need it
<$mt:include module="ShareThis"$>
Do the same with the Entry Summary template
- Rebuild site
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