The Secret of Sharing Posts

You may have spotted a new icon at the foot of each post on ScienceText.com of late, with the words “Share This” next to it. If you haven’t clicked it, give it a try, you may be pleasantly surprised at what pops up: a little box of tricks that allows you to bookmark the particular post in question on your favorite social bookmarking site, whether that’s Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or any of a clutch of others, as well as the likes of the blog directory technorati.

The tricky box, which comes courtesy of Wordpress plugin guru Alex King, provides what I’d say is the cleanest implementation of social bookmarking available to bloggers and others. Other plugins either stack up a long list of icons for every collective favorites site out there or else take you offsite to a repository page that displays the icons instead. Alex’s implementation with its cute green point-to-point icon (created in the spirit of the orange newsfeed icons you see in your browser address bar) is much crisper and avoids the usual distracting array of icons and doesn’t involve a third-party site that a blogger can never know will not be “down” when one’s readers want to socialize.

Anyway, this post is probably not much of a share, but think about clicking that icon next time you read a great tip here or find an interesting item you’d like to share with your fellow social bookmarks.