I always wondered how people got all of those individual little social bookmarking icons at the end of each post. You can’t make it much easier than that for people to submit a post that they enjoy reading. This could translate to additional traffic.

I finally discovered the Sociable plugin. (Thanks to Courtney Tuttle’s very fine post entitled 102 Ways to Make Your Site a Back-Link Superstar) Download it to your computer and upload to your plugin folder. After activating it go into your options tab in WordPress, select sociable and configure which bookmarking services you want to list and what order you would like to see them in).

One important note! Apparently the StumbleUpon link in the plugin is broken. When you click on the StumbleUpon icon you will come to a 404 page. This is probably due to StumbleUpon changing a URL. The fix is easy. TD Creative has given us the solution:

One of these social networks is StumbleUpon and is implemented in the Sociable plugin, however there is a bug (probably caused by a URL change in the way StumbleUpon handle submissions) which causes a 404 error when you try to submit a post there. To fix it, in the sociable.php script find:

‘StumbleUpon’ => Array(
‘favicon’ => ’stumbleupon.png’,
‘url’ => ‘http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/PERMALINK’,
),

And replace with:

‘StumbleUpon’ => Array(
‘favicon’ => ’stumbleupon.png’,
‘url’ => ‘http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=PERMALINK’,
),

Save and upload the file. You can alternatively do this in the plugin editor in Wordpress’ control panel.

Do not cut and paste the above code because the quotations are not standard and not recognized by WordPress (you will get a fatal error). Just retype the changed URL - which is the only change from the original code and it should work.

An alternative to the Sociable plugin is the AddThis widget. For this service you need to add some code to your template and a little “add this” bar will appear after every post. When a reader clicks this bar they will get to choose from a variety of bookmarking services.