wildernessVoice

I've just added some more fun to my site via Grouptivity. Basically, Grouptivity allows you to bookmark articles on the web that you find interesting. You can opt to email the articles directly from the site or bookmark them on your Facebook and other social networking sites. And, it's yet another way of making some advertising revenue.

Now, while it clearly has some cool potential, I think a lot of its potential will depend on other bloggers adding support to their sites. So, I'm going to spend a little time describing how to do this.

1. You'll need to download the Share+ plugin and add it to your plugins directory on your server (~/public_html/wp-content/plugins).
2. You'll need to enable the widget in the appearance section of your dashboard. Typically, this is also where you would select your theme as well.
3. You'll need a publisher's ID and you can get one here. Please bare in mind that you have two accounts to sign up for: the publisher one and the reader one.
4. If you're like many WordPress bloggers, you're probably using some 3rd party theme. And that will likely mean that you're not widget enabled. Unfortunately, this has to be fixed if you're going to have the support on your site. I'm going to explain how to fix this with a couple of lines of PHP code to your sidebar.php file. Open up your sidebar.php and decide where you want to place it. For many, this can be near the top where your first div tag is located. You're essentially going to add a loop here that says if you have widgets, place them in this location, otherwise... just add these other items. The good news is that by placing this in your sidebar, you can control search, posts, pages, categories, archives, etc. in your sidebar by simply going to your widgets page. You don't have to modify code any more. Anyway, these are the lines you need:
   MIKE'S CODE SNIPPET
   PHP:

   1. <?php   /* Widgetized sidebar, if you have the plugin installed. */
   2.                 if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
   3.             <?php get_links_list(); ?>
   4.             <?php endif; ?>

6. You'll also have to add a new file called functions.php. This file will be located in the root directory of your theme (~/public_html/wp-content/themes/your_theme/). In this file, you'll have to add the following lines of code:
   MIKE'S CODE SNIPPET
   PHP:

   1. <?php
   2. if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
   3.     register_sidebar();
   4. ?>

That's pretty much it. You'll want to fine tune things via your CSS settings. But that typically requires a bit of finessing. If you run into problems, just go to my contact page and send me an email.

I am still working out a few quirks related to special characters. For example, the apostrophe in Ain't isn't displaying properly. It's being converted into its html code.

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facebook, grouptivity, share+, social bookmarking, wordpress