Right now I’m in the process of changing up some of the social icons on my various sites. For a few years now, I’ve been a fan of the Sociable plugin for WordPress. It’s an excellent plugin that makes it easy to add quick links to various social site (Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc) for users to click on.
It looks something like this:
It’s a great plugin, but I was wanting more. A few months ago, Facebook released a pretty slick “Like” button that could be added to sites, and just recently Twitter added a similar “Tweet” button. Rather than being simple links like the buttons above, these buttons are much more interactive. You can see who else has tweeted/linked the post, and users can tweet/like without having to leave the page.
The problem then became clutter. If I added both of the new buttons and still kept sociable, I’d be making things rather messy. So, Sociable had to go.
You can install the buttons manually if you want, but I found a few simple plug-ins to do the job for me instead. There are many to choose from (and all of them are quite similar), but I’m using:
- Twitter Button for WordPress
- WP FB Like Button
So far, I like them! While it’s kind of a shame to lose the other icons, these are the two that people use overwhelmingly, and I really like how much cleaner things look.
You can see the new buttons just below this post.
What do you think? Have you installed either of these on your site yet?
