Setting up Stumble Upon in the Sociable Plugin
By
While it seems that everything I touch today breaks, I am learning a bunch in the process! My honorary error checker, Randa Clay 
discovered that my Stumble Upon button at the bottom of my posts wasn’t working. I checked and she was right (of course) – it didn’t work. So we checked hers. Guess what? It wasn’t set up right either. And I have found that quite of few of my favorite bloggers (I will email them privately) are also experiencing the same issue.
The Sociable plugin for WordPress allows you to select a variety of social networking sites and have little buttons for them created at the bottom of your posts – so people can submit them to Digg greatness or induce a great rush of traffic to your site via Stumble Upon. The plug in is nifty and easy to install, but there is a glitch in the original code for the Stumble Upon segment.
TO FIX YOURS
Login to your WordPress admin panel and select Plugins. Then select Plugin Editor. Choose the Sociable one. Take a look through the code until you find this:
Change it to:
Choose Update File and you should be in business!
Here’s hoping you now get a nice stream of Stumble traffic, Digg goodness and such! And don’t be shy about Digging or Stumbling posts you like here either ::wink, wink::
6 Comments
March 22nd, 2007 at 9:24 am
If you swap your RSS feed over to FeedBurner, they have a little widget you can add to the foot of your posts, as I do, that shows a text link for ‘stumble’ ‘digg’ ‘del.icio.us’ and many many more to choose from. I didn’t want to over-do it though.
I noticed recently you made a comment about asking your readers to stumble pages they find interesting.
Maybe you could check out my ‘advertising’ category and stumble the category? If you have something you’d like stumbled just let me know.
More than happy to oblidge.
March 22nd, 2007 at 9:25 am
Or was it Randa who made that comment?
Apologies if it wasn’t you, Char.
March 22nd, 2007 at 10:48 am
David – do you think the text links work better than the icons?
March 22nd, 2007 at 11:06 am
I’m not sure, Char.
Here’s the thing, if someone has signed up to stumble, digg, del.icio.us etc. then they’ll already have those icons in their browsers, up top with the address bar.
The question I can’t answer is whether an additional icon will prompt them more.
Back when I began blogging I used a row of about eight little social icons at the top and bottom of each post. After a while it just looked like clutter to me, so I ditched it.
Then when FeebBurner introduced text links I thought I’d give that a go, for all the RSS readers out there.
Long story short, you don’t see too many of the really popular blogs using them.
Do you get much benefit from it?
March 22nd, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Char, have you found the “sociable” buttons to be beneficial? Do people really use them? Mind if I suggest this as a topic for discussion? It would go along so nicely with this post
After I typed that up there ^ I realized that David asked much the same. Perhaps there’s enough of us out here wondering to warrant a little discussion.
March 22nd, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Gayla – The jury is still out on the sociable icons. I only installed them about a month ago and I’m not sure how to track their effectiveness. I will say that about 4 of my recent posts have been Stumbled – I can tell that by looking at my stats report.
I will have to do a full post on this – maybe we can get some other pros to chime in.