Embedding Social Media in this blog…
June 6, 2008 – 2:30 pm by Griffin Hammond…is being more difficult than it should.
Last night I added my Twitter ”tweet” (feed) to the right side of this page. Integrates well, but the problem is the javascript code can only handle one user. (Ideally I’d add other people’s tweets underneath, but currently that seems impossible.) It also seems like the tweet takes forever to load, which slows the whole page load. (Twitter appears to be having some maintenance issues right now.)
Today I’m trying out several social bookmarking sites to figure out which one will best allow me to embed a running list of links on this blog. One of the reasons I started this site was to give me a reason to try out a bunch of social bookmarking sites (there appear to be a large variety).
Here are my initial impressions of these common social bookmarkers:
- Del.icio.us: simplistic page design (but I guess that’s the point), links embeddable on a blog (but the page with the code appears to not be working, so that’s a dead end at the moment)
- Digg: one of the more popular ones, aesthetically pleasing site, lots of profile settings I probably won’t use, and unfortunately I don’t see a way to embed links on an external page
- Reddit: a site I never noticed until recently, painfully simple looking (ugly), sometimes messy and buggy design, but apparently has embedding feature (we’ll find out if it works in a minute) might just be simple enough to do the trick!
P.S. We need to come up with an abbreviation for “social bookmarking.” Socbooks? Somarks? Smarx? I like.
P.P.S. And do I categorize Twitter as a social network or a blog, or both?
UPDATE: Alright, maybe Reddit IS too simplistic to serve my needs. Here’s their blog widget (for embedding):
The image and title are ugly, and the link doesn’t load in a new window/tab, but you’d think maybe I could change those things. The javascript doesn’t have any editable attributes, or any useful options on the site. I guess I’ll keep trying new “smarx” until I run out!
I’ll just have to try all these smarx sites: Backflip, BlinkList, Blogmarks, Faves, Diigo, Fark, Furl, Feed Me Links, Google Bookmark, LinkaGoGo, Live Bookmarks, Magnolia, Mixx, Mr. Wong, Netvouz, Newsvine, Propeller, Segnalo, Simpy, Smarking, Spurl, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Webnews, and Yahoo Bookmarks. (Did you see “Smarking” in there?! I guess I’m not original.)
