At WRD, the previous tweet button for sharing stories was the cool Easy Retweet Button by John Resig. However, it was not perfect as, sometimes, it was unable to communicate with the URL shortener service and the tweet links were appearing buggy.

In search for a better one, I tested few others including the official tweet button. They were loading the links ok but had other issues like "loading slow", "blocking pages on load", etc.

And, for a button that is clicked by -maybe- 1/100 of the visitors, loading the scripts and making requests for every visitor didn't look like the smartest choice.

Here is another method, that is actually used at WRD now which loads very fast for everyone and almost fault-proof.

How it works?

First of all, the button is hosted locally and it does not make any requests until it is clicked.

• A link with the querystring that includes URL and the title of the web page is created, pointed to a server-side file (to be presented later in this article) and attached to any custom button we design.
• Once clicked, it sends the URL and title to the server-side file which creates the tweet link and redirects to Twitter with the tweet.

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Today, if not over-promoted, sharing your social activity or the content you generate in various ways is a good method to gain exposure.

WiseStamp is an add-on, with versions for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Flock and Thunderbird, for  auto-inserting content from various resources to e-mail signatures.

Besides Thunderbird, it is compatible with the popular e-mail services like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and AOL.

The content inserted can be grabbed from a RSS feed, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious or almost any other social network account.

The add-on is multilingual and already has support for 10+ languages.

So So Social is a jQuery plugin which parses RSS feeds from your various social networks and displays them as an "activity feed".

Thanks to YQL, it doesn't require any server-side scripts and can be completely customized with the help of CSS + JS settings.

By default, the plugin supports Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Tumblr, Last.FM, Delicious and Flickr.

In order to add more services, just digging the code and extending it with the same methodology will be enough.

ThinkUp is an open source web application that helps you analyze your activities and friends better in Twitter and Facebook (more networks to come).

It can display you all replies to a message, a stream of all photos posted or links tweeted by friends (by expanding the short URLs).

ThinkTank enables you to get detailed statistics about your activity, such as your average replies per day or how often you update.

Also, it provides insights about your followers and friends, like who's most popular or who updates least often.

Another great feature is the ability to backup all your activities and even publish a presentable list of replies to one of your questions (including integration with blogging tools like WordPress).

OpenLike is a fresh and open source social bookmarking widget which is simple-yet-functional.

Similar to professional services like AddThis or ShareThis, but much simpler, you can add social bookmarking options to any website by simply inserting a JavaScript file.

By default, the widget supports StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, Google Buzz, Twitter, Facebook Like and Hutch (the ones to be displayed can be customized).

However, as you can get the source, adding new ones is very easy by simply defining them to the JavaScript array, the CSS file and the sprite image.

Anyone who visited Mashable lately, the popular social news website, might have seen the "drag to share" functionality which appears when hovering an image.

It is a smart technique which encourages visitors to share a story by offering a quite fun usage.

Nettuts+ is sharing a very nice tutorial (with source) that enables you to implement this feature using jQuery & jQuery UI.

It makes use of the draggable & droppable components of jQuery UI to make drag’n dropping & targeting objects possible.

To see how it works, a demo is provided as well.

John Resig is sharing very functional script named Easy Retweet Button that will simplify "the sharing of your content on Twitter".

It is an unobtrusive JavaScript file for displaying a retweet link with a shortened URL via Bit.ly (similar to Tweetmeme) & number of clicks came to that content from Twitter.

Easy Retweet Button has 2 ready-to-go styles: vertical & horizontal. And it can be easily themed as only HTML, CSS & JavaScript is used.

It is possible to customize the "Retweet" text, prefix of the tweets (like RT @..) & Bit.ly username / API key to be used.

It offers various advantages like:

• speed: it works completely asynchronously
• tracking: all the tracking is done via Bit.ly & clicks from retweets can be tracked from a single interface

Steps For Using It With WordPress:

This is nothing complicated but can save your time:

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Flash Bookmarks is a free Flash component for integrating social bookmarking links to any website easily.

It supports the most popular sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Facebook, Google and Reddit.

The look & feel of the social bookmarking menu created with the component is totally customizable. It is possible to change:

• the icons to be displayed
• the size of the icons
• the aspect of the hint text for the icons
• details regarding the bookmarked data.

Flash Bookmarks can be both added by drag’n drops from the component panel of Flash or by code (AS3).

Social bookmarking buttons like Digg, Delicious or StumbleUpon on any website is very familiar. They help spreading the content.

Twitter, getting bigger & better, is also another powerful network where content can reach to thousands easily in minutes.

To help the readers of a website share/tweet a content at Twitter easily, here is a simple way of integration:

You can send a querystring to Twitter like:

http://twitter.com/home?status=Your Tweet. For example, a tweet link for this post can be:

http://twitter.com/home?status=How To Add Tweeting With Short URL Functionality To A Website (With PHP): http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/how-to-add-tweeting-with-short-url-functionality-to-a-website-with-php/

The problem & the solution:

There is a 140 character limit in Twitter & the length of the URL is a headache. So, auto-shortening the URL with a short URL service will be handy.

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This is a free social bookmarking script that does not automatically inserts all the popular social bookmark links into your website.

It provides you the base & enables you to easily create/customize bookmarking links.

How to use it?

• insert sbookmark.js to your webpages
• call the function for the preferred bookmarking site like: <a href="#" onclick="sbs_delicious(); return false;">...</a> for delicious.com.

In short, it saves your time from learning the submission formats of each social bookmarking website.

In the download page there is also a social bookmarking images pack.