Continuing from my guest spot on LinkersBlog, I am looking at plugins that are geared toward just one or two social sites, rather than large numbers of them. So here are a few plugins that focus on Digg and 2 or 3 other sites.

Digging It

Everybody wants to be Dugg. You might not keep more than a fraction of the people that visit you site as readers, but that fraction can be a huge gain in regulars for most people. That is one reason most plugins include Digg in their list of bookmarking sites. This article at ProBlogger can give you an idea of what making the front page there can do for your site. Or to it, if you aren’t ready for it.

WP Digg This gives you exact control over what pages and posts it appears on. You do not have any options for different icons, and it does not appear automatically anywhere, you need to add a custom field to the pages and posts you want it on. You can set the icon to appear on your Home, Category, Search, and Archive pages, but unless they have full articles on them, you probably don’t want to.

You only have limited control over where the icon appears on a page. You can change some CSS styling on the option page to float it to the right of the post. But it will be at the top of the post, there are no options for placing it at the bottom. Adding the custom field is not the most intuitive process, but not too difficult. And the lack of placement options on your posts is somewhat irritating. But a simple enough plugin to use, and it does what it says it will.

Vote It! is technically not just a Digg plugin. It installs with Digg already set up, ready to use, which is why I put it here. But you can also add in other social sites to it, using the code you get from the other sites. There are 4 preset locations for placing the buttons, and the option of placing it manually if you are comfortable with hacking a PHP file. You decide which posts and pages you want the buttons on by checking a box on the edit page for each service. This gives incredible flexibility, since you can pick and choose exactly which social sites you want on which posts.

In order to use this flexibility, you need t0 go to the social sites and get their code for adding buttons and adding it on the option page. For some sites, that is easy, for others, it is not. And adding very many sites could easily get irritating. Another limitation is that in order to have buttons on all your posts, you need to got to each one and check the service you want there. There is no automatic addition of the icons. But if you have just a few places you want to target, or you want to target particular social sites with certain posts, and you are comfortable with working with php, this is a plugin to keep in mind.

I originally wrote about the diggZ-Et plugin for just that one service, but since then, the developers have combined their 4 plugins into one, S-ButtonZ. It included Digg, Reddit, dZone, and Yahoo Buzz right now, but the authors are planning on adding more. You can choose exactly which ones you want to appear, which then allows you to set options for the ones you chose.

You have a large amount of control over where the icons appear. You can choose from pages, posts, and archives, both category and tag. And you have 4 places you can put them on those pages, which can help keep them out of the way of any ads you may be showing. And you can place each of the icons separately on the page. The best part is if you do not want a particular page to have a particular icon, you can drop a comment code on the post or page and it will not appear, without affecting the rest of your blog. The amount of control you get is very nice.

Digg Digg has the same sites available as the S-ButtonZ plugin, Digg, Reddit, dZone, and Yahoo Buzz. It is in fact a lot like the other plugin. You can pick and choose which type of pages each button shows up on independently from each other, as well as their placement on the page and which icon appears. All of the options are easily done by checkboxes or dropdown menus.

The actual place options are somewhat limited. Basically the icons can appear before or after the page content, or it can float on the right or left of the top paragraph.  You can place the icons elsewhere, if you are willing to dig into some PHP files. The icon options work pretty well for these locations, but the choices are more limited than in S-ButtonZ, especially the Yahoo Buzz options. A solid plugin, which does what is intended and is easy to use.

Something Different

PopuList is not a plugin for linking to the social bookmarking sites, rather a way of seeing how your posts do there. It looks at Reddit, Digg, del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon to see how often your pages and posts are saved or voted for at those sites. A nice way to see things all on one page on your dashboard.

Final Words

While Digg is considered the social site it is not the only ways to get links or to bring people in to your site. Darren at ProBlogger has an article about the synergy between StumbleUpon and Digg, illustrating the benefits of both sites. So while you may want to stick that Digg icon up at the top of your post, do not forget to give your readers other options for promoting you.

While each of these plugins makes it easy for your readers to submit your posts, there needs to be something more before that will happen. You need to have quality content that will stand out there. That is by far the hardest part of this blogging stuff.

I have been thinking about adding some ads on my site. I do not expect to make a living doing this, or even really make any money. I do not have a focus, which as many of the money making blogs point out, is really necessary. But it would be nice if I can get enough to occasionally defray some of the costs for my hosting. In that vein, I decided to look at the plugins out there that help handle ads on Wordpress.

And there are a lot of them. A large number are specifically made for using Google Adsense ads, but there are more that allow ads from other programs. I only wanted ones that work in Wordpress 2.7, which meant I didn’t look at a couple that had nice sounding features, but hadn’t been updated in several months.

Adsense Program plugins

• AdsenseAnna is probably the easiest plugin to use. It gives you a single widget for your sidebar, and you just need three things to get it going. A name for the widget, your Adsense-ID number, and what size you want the ad to be. And you chose the size from a drop down menu that looks like it has all the options that Google offers. No copy and paste of code, no worrying about how many ads are on a page, just input your ID and save. The only short coming is only one ad block is placed. You can’t have one anywhere but your sidebar with this plugin.
• EasyAdSenser limits your options for ad placement more than some of the other plugins, but does include an option for an ad in your sidebar, along with a Google search bar. You need to copy and paste your Adsense code from Google, but this lets you chose different size ads for different locations. There are also two ways to prevent ads showing on a particular page or post. The search bar on this one, along with the sidebar ad, makes this plugin stand out.

AdSense and Other Programs

• AdSense Integrator is a nice way to add code into a page in a variety of areas. It is probably the most versatile plugin, since you can decide exactly which posts and/or pages you want an ad to appear on. Including your Archives, Category, and Tags pages. It also allows you to place ads exactly where you want them on the page using a small checkbox gui. You do need to copy the ad script into a box on the setup page, which is one of the things that makes this useful for multiple ad campaigns. You can even set it so that ads from different programs appear on the same page/post in different places. Or ads from one program on pages, another program on posts. The only real shortcoming is the lack of a widget for sidebar placement. But the authors are working on that.
• All in One Adsense and YPN allows you to place ads from 2 different programs, Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher’s Network. You can use either program alone, or both at the same time. Set up is easy, you just need to paste your ID number from either program into the setup page, choose the ad size, and the number of ads per page. A lot of placement options for ads, including random, on your pages. It lets you decide if you want ads on particular pages and/or posts, and gives you two short codes to give you more control over placement. It is limited to the 2 programs, and has no option for sidebar placement of ads. And the size of the ads is limited also, probably to only the sizes used in both programs.
• Ozh Who Sees Ads is a more complicated plugin to use. It allows you to control who sees an ad, so regular readers are not annoyed by a lot of them, but search engine visitors see them regularly. It can be used with any program, and you can place ads anywhere you want in a post using the generated comment codes, which are in a dropdown on the HTML editor. You can also place ads in your sidebars, but it requires editing the php file and placing that generated php code. Not the easiest plugin to set up, but can definitely be worth the effort.
• Smart Ads is another plugin that is useful for any ad program. You need to paste your generated code into the appropriate box, it will be placed either before, after, or both places in your post. You can also use a custom box that will placed where ever you put a shortcode on your blog. You can also choose to exclude particular categories from having ads shown, or not have ads appear on short posts or for registered members. But it does not have any options for sidebar placement.
• Shantanu’s WP Prefix Suffix Plugin is not really an ad plugin. It allows you to add some form of content, text, HTML/CSS, javascript, etc., before, after, or in the middle of the a page or post. It can easily be used for ads, you just need to paste the code into one of the 3 input boxed, depending on where you want the ad to appear. And you have control over whether it appears on pages, posts, your homepage, and your excerpts. Easy to set up, and can be very useful for all kinds of things, but somewhat limited for ad placement.

Other Programs Only

• Chitika | Premium plugin is only for the Chitika Premium program. According to their FAQ, you are allowed to show Chitika ads on the same pages as Adsense ads, even encouraging you to ask your Adsense rep to make sure. There are limited options for ad placement, basically above or below your post, although there are a variety of ad sizes and you can keep ads from appearing by using a shortcode.  Like many other plugins, there is no option for sidebar placement with it.

So there you are. Several choices for putting ads on your blog and making a little money. Some of them place a linkback to the author’s site, others give you the option of letting the author replace one of your ads with theirs a fraction of the time, still others just ask for a donation. None of these options seem unreasonable, since you are using their work to (hopefully) make money, and on these plugins at least, you can decide if and how much any ad replacement takes place.

As for which one I will use? I am not certain yet. There is always the question of versatility versus ease of use. I am leaning toward Easy Adsenser because of the two widgets for the sidebar as well as the ads in the posts. Or it would probably be possible to combine AdSenseAnna with one of the others that does not have a sidebar option, although that would require care not to break the various placement rules.