Well, it took longer than I expected, but I’ve released version 3 of Simple Social Bookmarks. With over 200 social bookmarking sites to choose from and brand new animation options, it’s looking good!

You can read more here or over on the WordPress plugin site.

If you wish to try it out now, simply move to the bottom of this post to find my own site use of them – it uses a simple movement option as you hover over each.

The final tally of bookmarking sites is 218 with 23 tools to add as well. Originally, sharing was to be performed by AddThis and Shareaholic. However, when the plugin changes were nearly complete, I came across APIs from AddToAny and ShareThis. Unfortunately, I had problems with the ShareThis API, and they didn’t respond to requests from their technical support email address, so I dropped them at the last minute.

This didn’t reduce the number of bookmarking sites down, though, as they only had a handful that the others didn’t already cover – instead I found the manual link for these and added them in.

Here are the default icons for all 241 sites…

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…