Sociable: More Plugin Method to the Madness

Why is it that all of us get on particular jags?  I started yesterday with a minor interest in pursuing some semantic Web relationships with my blog site and soon found I was cruising in all directions plugins.

My last post describes the first stages of semantic readiness for my blog, with a number of follow-on enhancements in the works.  But in the process, I also came upon a nice display of social bookmark sites at the Ebiquity blog (thanks, Tim Finin, it is one of my favorites) that I immediately envied.

Well, after an amazingly short time in research, I came across one plugin that puts such links on WordPress — Sociable — that is a very clean and capable plugin.  It not only installs like a dream in WordPress (standard procedure), but it also adds some nice option settings that allow you, the blog administrator, to:

• Select which pages the bookmark links appear on
• Select which bookmarks get listed
• And, select the order and some other display options.

In fact, install was so easy in looking at the PHP I was confused as to how the obvious settings and options in the plugin could be set.  My only silly criticism of the Sociable plugin is that there is virtually NO documentation and NO hype, which meant it took me a little poking around to see that when installed these site administrator options even became available.  But once discovered, cool.  How these setting options look in my WordPress administration center is shown below: 

Now we’re talking real power and coolness in a plugin.

Socialble was inspired by Paul Stamatiou and Kirk Montgomery developed and released the first version of the plugin as WP-Sociable in January 2006. In February 2006, Peter Harkins took over development. So, as you notice the new cool icons at the bottoms of my posts, credit goes to Peter and his predecessors and the Sociable plugin.  Nice work, guys.