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).

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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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I love reading the comments on each article I post. If you leave one, you’re near guaranteed I’ll reply to you directly and keep the conversation going.

The trouble is that after a day or two of an article being live, the spammers descend and the lovely, informative comment thread descends into “great article, agree with your points, visit my site”. It’s just not cool…

We’re working on a full redesign to Pro Blog Design, and one of the things I’m most interested in is this comments issue. How can I make sure the comment threads stay in that awesome-to-read stage from the first few days when an article is written?

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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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The title sums it up really, we are finally on Facebook. But we aren’t just setting up another automated page that does nothing more than pull in updates from the site. No, we want to give you a reason to join us on Facebook.

Intrigued? You might want to just go ahead and join in with us now then. Otherwise, read on to hear what we have in store.

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