Spring has sprung and March is over, change is in the air and a new hosting billing cycle begins. The following article was published in April when my monthly bandwidth allowance was reset back to zero (from 60 GB). Initially, I created this website so I could learn about the web, how to run a website, do a little programming / graphical design / tinker. It pretty much still serves that function. In the beginning I would churn through 300 mb of bandwidth (in a very busy month), but last month I whipped through vastly greater quantities due to social bookmarking and free icons. The rest of this article explains some interesting patterns I observed in web traffic, and concludes with some general things you should consider if you would like more exposure for your website.
» Read the rest of the entry..

Providing links to social bookmarking websites is a no-brainer. This article explains why you should have social bookmarking sites for your users.

Executive Summary

The primary reason to do provide social bookmarking links is exposure. Exposure translates into visits to your website which translates into prestige (whether perceived or not is up for debate) and revenue (if you sell a product or have advertisements on your site).

Social bookmarking provides: » Read the rest of the entry..

I have just updated the Alexa ranking for all of the social bookmarking sites used by Sociable (a wordpress plugin). You can see them all here, and read reviews (as they are created) for each site.

In the past week, all but one social bookmarking site currently tracked has increased in popularity — some sites dramatically. Interestingly enough, digg has passed del.icio.us as the number one social bookmarking site. This doesn’t indicate that digg is really more popular, perhaps more people who read digg also use the alexa toolbar (del.icio.us users maybe don’t use it as much). Regardless, all sites have improved indicating a general trend in web use:

People are relying less on traditional search engines and more on social bookmarking sites to find the information they are looking for. And why? I believe its because social bookmarking sites are peer reviewed while search engines are not. » Read the rest of the entry..

URI: www.Fark.com
Popularity: 3
Special Feature: Fark Classifieds

Why should I care:

Cracking the public side of Fark is pretty much impossible for the standard website, unless you use » Read the rest of the entry..

URI: www.digg.com
Popularity: 1
Special Feature: User voting, digg spy, digg cloud

Why should I care:

Digg is a very popular website, » Read the rest of the entry..

URI: del.icio.us
Popularity: 2
Special Feature: Widely used

Why should I care:

Del.icio.us is the number one social bookmarking site » Read the rest of the entry..

Update 16/03/06: Download the latest version of Sociable at its new home. This is a full blown version 1.0 with many new features. Namely, no template editing. Wow! Good job PH!

Paul Stamatiou has contributed several interesting tutorials on how to customise K2, a theme for wordpress. One of his customisations is a set of icons at the bottom of a post that allow you to quickly bookmark the current page at a number of social bookmarking sites (Digg, Del.icio.us, blink, furl, etc.). You can see it in action on his blog, www.paulstamatiou.com, and here at MaxPower on the bottom of every page that is a post. He credits this idea to Mr. Veloso.

Features:

» Read the rest of the entry..

Update Jan 2005: This is the basis for what became Sociable, a plugin for wordpress. Go and get it.

Use this code:

< ?php if( is_single() ) { ?>

    /wp-content/plugins/sociable/images/delicious.gif” class=”socialbkmark” alt=”< ?php the_title(); ?>“/>    /wp-content/plugins/sociable/images/diggman.gif” class=”socialbkmark” alt=”< ?php the_title(); ?>“/>    /wp-content/plugins/sociable/images/blinklist.gif” class=”socialbkmark” alt=”< ?php the_title(); ?>“/>    /wp-content/plugins/sociable/images/furl.gif” class=”socialbkmark” alt=”< ?php the_title(); ?>“/>    /wp-content/plugins/sociable/images/reddit.gif” class=”socialbkmark” alt=”< ?php the_title(); ?>“/>    /wp-content/plugins/sociable/images/fark.gif” class=”socialbkmark” alt=”< ?php the_title(); ?>“/>    /wp-content/plugins/sociable/images/yahoomyweb.gif” class=”socialbkmark” alt=”< ?php the_title(); ?>“/>
< ?php } ?>