I'm sure those of you out there reading this blog also read a lot of other blogs and have noticed over time the chickletization of blog pages with little icons for all the different bookmarking services like Del.icio.us and Digg, and on and on with the ever growing plethora of other services. I was starting to feel that the mojoPortal blog was a little behind the times in this respect. Then I noticed on TechCrunch, the use of the AddThis.com widget. After looking into the integration I could see that it was relatively low hanging fruit to implement a .NET control that makes it easy to add the AddThis button.
Use of the .NET control in markup is like this:
<mp:AddThisButton ID="at1" runat="server"
AccountId=""
ButtonImageUrl="~/Data/SiteImages/addthisbookmarkbutton.gif"
Text="Share This Using Popular Bookmarking Services"
CustomBrand="mojoPortal"
CustomLogoUrl="http://www.mojoportal.com/Data/mojoportal_box_dropshadow.png"
CustomLogoBackgroundColor="e8e8e8"
CustomOptions=""
UrlToShare=""
TitleOfUrlToShare=""
/>
If you leave the UrlToShare and TitleofUrlToShare blank it automatically uses the current page which makes it easy to add it to the layout.master file of your mojoPortal skin so it appears on every page.
In the blog we databind those properties to the title and url of the blog post.
If the account id is not set the control doesn't render.
Now we can just let AddThis.com keep track of the emerging services and add them for us instead of having to add a new chicklet every time some cool new service appears.
At the time of this post, this feature is only available from the mojoPortal source code repository, but it will be in the next release coming soon.
Update 5:39 PM: I just discovered that AddThis.com also has a button for RSS subscriptions so that one button can offer all the popular services. So I will be implementing use of that soon too and doing away with the multiple graphics (chicklets) for RSS subscriptions that we currently have. This is what the new button will look like (there are several options but this is my pick), I'll implement it so that users can choose their own button graphic.
click it to see the rss feed subscription choices. I don't want to have to keep up with all those chicklets either, so AddThis has a great idea here.