Pro Blog Design

This is one of the most common questions I get asked; how do you make a floating box with share links?

Today, we’re going to see just how simple it can be. We will:

• Set up the current trinity of search (Facebook, Twitter, +1).
• See how to make sure they share the right URL.
• Align the box to the bottom left of the user’s browser.
• Hide the box if the user’s browser is too small (So it never overlaps our content).

You can see the demo site here (Try resizing your browser smaller).

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You will have seen blogs showcase their Twitter, Facebook, and RSS counts with typography. With these numbers in plain text, you can style them into your website far more effectively than if you were to use the old-fashioned “chicklets.”

Twitter and Facebook make this easy, but you’ll need to take an extra step with FeedBurner first. Log in, then click Publicize > Awareness API, and click activate.

All set? Then let’s get started!

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There are plenty of Twitter plugins for WordPress. Why would we want to make our own script?

Well, most of the plugins come with a lot of fluff you just don’t need. Ours will be simple and efficient; all it needs to do is grab your tweets and display them.

The other reason is control; you write the markup, so it’s entirely up to you how it is displayed.

The last reason is that because we’re getting the tweets directly from the Twitter API feeds (i.e. no verification is going to be needed), we can easily display tweets from a Twitter List instead of just our own tweets.

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It’s easy to use a service like TwitterCounter.com to get a little chicklet button of your Twitter follower number. If you have that number in plain text though, then you can style and integrate it into your site much more attractively. In this post, I’ll show you how to get it.

You can see the end result in the top right of Tiny Buddha, a site I recently coded using Chameleon (Though this will work on any WordPress theme!)

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Currently, Twitter is one of the most popular social networking sites. Most blogger are therefore interested in adding some twitter icons to their blog, so that their readers can submit their article to Twitter quickly, or just find their Twitter account and follow it.

Here we’ve collected together some of the best twitter icons we’ve come across online. Surely you’ll find one that suits your site!

For the code to add a twitter button to your blog, read Social Bookmarking Link Codes. And if you want to add some RSS buttons to your blog, you can visit the RSS Icons and Best Free Icons that we collected together to choose a great icon for your blog.

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We’re all on Twitter now, and it needs no introduction. But with so many people on Twitter, how can you make your profile stand out?

Twitter doesn’t offer a lot of tools for customizing your profile. It doesn’t go much further than a background image and a few colors.

But as you’ll see below, that’s more than enough for some people.

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Social bookmarking and link sharing is probably the largest source of traffic for most of us. Sites like Stumbleupon and Delicious send hundreds of thousands of visitors across the blogosphere.

So how can we encourage more people to share our links? One of the easiest options is to include a set of links at the bottom of your posts which readers can click to automatically vote for your article.

There are plugins which can do this of course, but that requires you to work with their settings, names icons in their banner and it means having yet another plugin installed on your site.

If you would rather avoid that and have complete control for yourself, then you might prefer to code the links into your theme yourself.

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