The hardest (or, rather, most time consuming) bit  of my changes to Simple Social Bookmarks is hunting down all the icons for the various social bookmarking services. Especially as, since my last post, I’ve vastly increased the number I’ll be using. Anyway, it’s now done – one for all 186 bookmarking services and 19 tools!

Thanks to Smush.it, nearly 23% has been trimmed from the images too.

It didn’t seem that long ago that I released version 2 of my popular WordPress plugin Simple Social Bookmarks.For those who haven’t come across this before it displays social bookmarking icons on a post or page (and can be seen under this post).

Version 2 was almost a complete re-write and introduced a few more bookmarks and a direct link to my Simple URL Shortener plugin for shortening URLs.

Well, now, I’m jumping straight to version 3 in what is another complete re-write!

Where-as previous versions may have introduced 1 or 2 new bookmarking sites, version 3 will increase it from 43 to 158! And there’s more possibilities in future – I’ve trawled various sharing sites (such as AddThis, etc) for their lists of bookmarking sites and have come to a list of 432. I’ve then ranked them according to the number of Google hits against their URL (145 I haven’t yet done) – the higher the hits, the more used they are. Only those with over 100,000 hits have been included (with the odd exception). And that’s just the current situation – I’m sure by release, these figures will have changed.

Anyway, other than a plethora of new bookmarks, here’s what else is changing…

• I’m now using AddThis and Shareaholic for the majority of links – by using their API, they will handle the passing of data to the services. I’ve also added a new parameter so that you can specify which one of these companies will be given priority if they both handle the same service.
• I’ve removed use of Simple URL Shortener plugin – you now pass the shortened URL yourself, allowing any shortening plugin to be used
• All the default icons have changed – obviously lots added, but existing ones changed. This is because, with so many, I can’t use a swizzy matching set, as before, so I’m now using the sites own favicon.
• I’ve separated bookmarks and tools (e.g. sending the URL to a site that creates a PDF) and, optionally, you can display a separator between the two
• There are now 140 bookmarking services and 19 tools available
• Used smush.it to compress images
• I’m adding the ability to provide basic animation of the icons – one set for static display and another can be used for when the icon is “hovered over”.

If there’s anything else you’d like to see, now’s your chance as I’m still in the middle of the above changes. What would you like to see it do? What would you not like to see it do?

What I should do (and haven’t yet) is to look at the competing Social Bookmark plugins and see what they can do. I’m also mulling over the idea of integrating in Google Analytics as well. Hmm…

WordPress 3.0.2 has been released…

This maintenance release fixes a moderate security issue that could allow a malicious Author-level user to gain further access to the site, addresses a handful of bugs, and provides some additional security enhancements.

The official WordPress announcement

Change Details

A list of the modified files (between WordPress 3.0.1 and 3.0.2)

Download 3.0.2 (entire installation)

Download 3.0.2 (just the changed files between 3.0.1 and 3.0.2)