Social Bookmarks: Hide and Seek

UPDATE: – With the new site design and the lack of usage of the links, I decided to take them off. No complaints thus far! This modification still works if you would like to use it.

I was the butt of some joking going on over at Nektros. The entry was all about why you should get rid of all of those one-click social bookmarking links on your site. I’ve had a few other folks comment on them as well… someone told me I only had 25 [sarc].

I didn’t want to take them off… I kind of like them. I’m not sure why exactly, but I do. Besides making it easy to bookmark my page, I also want folks to see all the sites out there that help bookmark. There’s a ton of them! I’m sure, sooner or later, the good ones will rise to the top and the others will die off, but I don’t want to pressure anyone to use one or the other.

So… I did what any good hacker would do. I hacked the Sociable plugin and added some JavaScript that toggles the buttons on or off. It took 3 changes:

1. Edit the Sociable Plugin to add the link to click on and off… note the bottom line hasn’t changed… that’s just to show you where to put the code in:
   <?php $post = $wp_query->post;
$html .= '<ul><li><a class="link" title="Display all of the Social Bookmarking options." onClick="showdiv(\'bookmark_'.$postid.'\');">Social Bookmarking</a></li></ul>';
$html .= '>div id="bookmark_'.$postid.'" class="sociable" style="display:none"><span class="sociable_tagline">';
$html .= get_option("sociable_tagline"); ?>
2. Edit the Sociable.css file to set add a hand/pointer cursor… because it’s simply an onclick event and not really a link:
   .link {
cursor: hand;
cursor: pointer;
}
3. Edit your theme’s header file to put the generic function in to toggle the div on and off:
   <script language="javascript">
function showdiv(name){
var obj = (document.getElementById)? document.getElementById(name) : eval("document.all[name]");
if (obj.style.display=="none"){
obj.style.display="";
}else{
obj.style.display="none";
}
}
</script>

So, clicking the Social Bookmarking link will toggle the content on and off for the specific post!

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