All those celebrities you thought I looked like. Tsk.

Can’t be right. I’ve never had any interest in Jordan.

At the time of writing this post you’ll probably notice (and it has been there a while) a “ShareThis” option at the bottom of each post and page. This allows readers to share the details on one of many Social Bookmarking sites using the popular ShareThis service¹.

Unfortunately, using a third party such as this does present problems. First of all it’s not the smallest² and it does rely heavily on JavaScript, which causes problems if you want to add a share facility in a news feed. They also spend a lot of the time trying to further push their service, adding on facilities you may now want and constantly trying to get the user to sign up. Not only that, but to be all things to all sites, it present a very long list of  bookmark possibilities. If anything, this is more than likely going to confuse the amateur user.

And, back to the technical downsides, you’re often reliant on third party apps to provide the bookmarking system on your site, which limits what you can do. Well, it’s either that or learn their API.

The BBC uses it’s own method and that’s to simply present a few of the most popular – it doesn’t use JavaScript, just simple images and links to the resultant bookmarking sites. And, because it doesn’t use JavaScript, you can stick the same details on the bottom of your news feeds. So, you lose access to some of the less popular bookmarking services – is that a great problem? They often come with their own bookmarklets and plugins anyway.

So, over the coming weeks you will find the ShareThis plugin being replaced with seperate bookmarking options. Yes, I will be writing this as a plugin which I will then publish – it will integrate Simple Twitter Link and Simple Facebook Link as well. But I digest…

Here, simply because I had to compile them anyway, are the URLs required for some of the more popular social bookmarking services…

Delicious – http://del.icio.us/post?url=[url]&title=[title]
Digg – http://digg.com/submit?url=[url]&title=[title]
Diigo – http://www.diigo.com/post?url=[url]&title=[title]
Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=[url]&t=[title]
Fark – http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/farkit.pl?u=[url]&h=[title]
reddit – http://reddit.com/submit?url=[url]&title=[title]
StumbleUpon – http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=[url]&title=[title]

In all cases, replace [url] with the URL and [title] with, erm, the title.

1. and, as always, other such services exist elsewhere! [↩]
2. as in terms of code size and, therefore, the speed of your site [↩]

X-Men Origins : Wolverine

I wasn’t expecting a great deal from this film, especially after the mediocre review from Empire Magazine, but I have to admit to being pleasantly surprised. That’s not to say it was a great film – it certainly had its flaws.

As you’d expect from the title this film is all about Wolverine – why he is who is he, how he got to where he was in the first X-Men film, etc. A lot of the most interesting stuff – him and his equally indestructible brother fighting together through 4 wars (American Civil War, Two World Wars, Vietnam) is glossed over through the opening credits. His brother, who we know as Sabretooth, then turns bad. We don’t know why, after all this time and it’s not really explored. This puts a rift between the 2 brothers.

Obviously the X-Men, as we know them, haven’t been formed by this point, but there are lots of other “mutants” with abilities, with many of them being pretty exceptional. Agent Zero (AKA Maverick), for instance, with his gun skills is particularly good. And Gambit… well, it’s a been long time coming and it was great to see him. He, seriously, needs a film of his own.

Cyclops also makes an appearance as his younger self but he never meets (that he’s aware of) Wolverine, so that remains consistent with the earlier films. In fact, it’s consistency with those films was my main concern about this film – how would they do it? Or, rather, would they not? Well, from what I could tell, they kept the consistency and they flowed together nicely. Obviously, Sabretooth is in the first X-Men film and why Wolverine doesn’t recognise his brother is covered. Sadly, why Sabretooth doesn’t recognise Logan isn’t, although there’s blatantly a number of years between the end of this film and the start of the first X-Men film.

One tip – wait until the end of the credits. Yes, there’s an extra scene part way through the credits but there’s another right at the very end. Sadly, depending on the cinema, one of two possible scenes is shown – one is better than the other. If the one you see involves a bar then make sure you read Wikipedia on the other scene.

Still, it had it’s flaws – there wasn’t much of a plot and it seemed to just jerk from one set piece to another. And if you hadn’t seen past X-Men films you’d probably have been confused to hell about some of the storyline elements.

But, not as bad as I was expecting. Roll on Star Trek next week!