Saturday, January 30, 2010

Social Bookmarking Icons for your blog

Do you have social bookmarking icons or chicklets on your blog?
Last year's explosion of social bookmarking sites like Facebook and Twitter have shown that people are influenced by their friends and online contacts when it comes to discovering new stuff online.

After a long search for a website I'm working on, I found two different ways to get these kinds of icons. One is super easy and the other, while still pretty easy, offers a ton of design choices.

The super easy method (for Blogger blogs) is to go to Sociofluid.com.
Check off the sites you want to include in your widget, decide on a size and how you want it to act when your viewers hover their mouse over the icons, then generate the widget. Easy Peasy.

Here's an example of their widget. I set the sizes at 32 and 48 and clicked to have it Grow Up with a mouseover. Here's what it looks like. Pretty cool. I wish it had a Flickr icon, though.

The other option offers lots of different designs. There are actually several sites with these free downloads, but the one with the choices I liked best is this page at wpzoom.com - yes, the WP refers to WordPress.

To use these, you'll have to download the file and install each icon individually, but you download each icon in all sizes so you can fit it into your blog or site perfectly. There are some really neat designs here.

As for me, I'll use the super easy method on one site, a hand-drawn design on another site, and bookmark both for when I want more.
Enjoy!


PS: Other sites I like that offer free social networking icons are:
http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2007/11/recent-posts-widget-plugin_25.html
and
http://www.wavemindedstudios.com/site/news/social-networking-icons








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