Plugins in Use @ Moondance – “Add-to-Any”

Posted by Michelle Petit-Sumrall as Blogging, Plugins, Widgets, Wordpress

In my second post on this blog I mentioned some of the Wordpress plugins that are available on Moondance, and promised I would explain how some of them work, why I’m using the ones I’ve chosen, and so on. I will do my best to do exactly that for you, starting with the “Add-to-Any” plugins.

Connecting to the world is the whole raison d’être of a blog, its lifeline. If people don’t read it, it is nothing more than a journal. Now journals are all well and good, I have nothing against them (though I can’t seem to ever be able to maintain one!); but the web allows us to feel published, and the next step is for people to actually read your stuff. To that end is the “Add-to-Any” plugin created.

There are two main ways information is shared across the web: RSS, also known as feeds, and link sharing. RSS feeds are almost like news broadcasts on demand: whenever you update your blog, the new information gets broadcast across the internet to the people who have subscribed to your blog. They know instantly the minute you create a new post or page.

Link sharing and bookmarking are a more direct method of sharing a specific page or post on your blog. Someone comes along, reads something so interesting that they think some of their friends, acquaintances, or colleagues might enjoy it, so they want to bookmark and/or share it.

In either case, there is a dizzying array of services that make subscribing and sharing information possible: social networks like Facebook or MySpace; sharing services like StumbleUpon; bookmark sharing sites like Windows Live Favorites; good old email via GMail; even your own blog. Add-to-Any is a service that gathers them all together and allows your readers to choose how they want to share YOUR writing.

In short, it’s a publishing clearinghouse for the web!

Therefore were they the first plugins I installed. Setup is easy. Go to the Dashboard. Find the Plugins link and click that. Scroll down to the “Inactive Plugins” section and find the Add-to-any plugins (there are two). Check the checkboxes and click on “Activate” to make them run on your setup. (If you have not activated “Wp-Hive” yet, please do so at this time as well. WP-Hive allows us to run several separate blogs without using multiple installations of Wordpress, and therefore helps us save disk space).

Next, you can change the look of the buttons. Go to Settings, then to either “Subscribe buttons” or “Share/Save Buttons” to configure them. Play around with the settings, or use them out of the box as they sit for ease of use and reader flexibility.

There’s one more step for the Subscribe button, so, still in the Dashboard, go to Design->Widgets. On the left is the listing of all the active widgets. Click the “Add” link next to the “Add to Any Subscribe” widget to add it to your sidebar. You can edit it to the look you want at this time. When ou’re done, click “save changes” to finish installing it on your page, and voilà! You’re done!

Once the page reloads, you might be tempted to move it up. DON’T. There’s only one thing wrong with the widget, and it has to do with the coding. It will wreak havoc with other widgets located below it and change the design of your sidebar. Whenever I get a chance, I may tweak it to fix it; in the mean time, please don’t take any chances.

Next time, protect your readers from spam comments with Akismet.

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