This post talks about steps 5 and 6 in pimping my blog.

5. Add del.icio.us, digg, and reddit links for people to easily bookmark and share your blog

Bookmarking and bookmark sharing services allow users to keep their bookmarks on the web, as well as sharing these bookmarks with their community. As such, it is very important for a blog to make it as easy as possible for readers to accomplish such tasks. I’ve implemented links to del.icio.us, digg, and reddit for my blog.

This step is usually accomplished by modifying the template for your blog. Because you’ll want to bookmark individual posts in addition to the entire blog, it is necessary to use variables within the template to indicate what the title of each post is, as well as what is the URL for each post (called permalink). Below is the code I used for Blogger:

del.icio.us: <a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>” mce_href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>” target=delicious title=”Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> to del.icio.us”>add to del.icio.us</a>

digg: <a href=”http://www.digg.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&phase=2″ mce_href=”http://www.digg.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&phase=2″Â target=digg title=”Submit <$BlogItemTitle$> to digg”>digg it</a>

reddit: <a href=”http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>” mce_href=”http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>” target=reddit title=”Submit <$BlogItemTitle$> to reddit”>reddit</a>

In the above Blogger example, The variable meanings are:

<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>: The URL of the individual posting.
<$BlogItemTitle$>: The title of the individual posting.

6. Make it easy for people to subscribe

As you can see under the Subscribe: heading in the left-hand panel, I have added the ability to subscribe from a variety of sources. Below I include the code that I added to my template for them (you’ll want to replace http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog with your own feed):

My Yahoo:
<a href=”http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” mce_href=”http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” >
<img src=”http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/
my/addtomyyahoo4.gif” border=”0″ alt=”Add to My Yahoo” />
</a>

Google:
<a href=”http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” mce_href=”http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” >
<img src=”http://buttons.googlesyndication.com/fusion/add.gif” mce_src=”http://buttons.googlesyndication.com/fusion/add.gif” width=”104″ height=”17″ border=”0″ alt=”Add to Google”>
</a>

Bloglines:
<a href=”http://www.bloglines.com/sub/
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog”> <img src=”http://www.bloglines.com/images/sub_modern8.gif” mce_src=”http://www.bloglines.com/images/sub_modern8.gif” border=”0″ alt=”Subscribe with Bloglines” />
</a>

Netvibes:
<a href=”http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” mce_href=”http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” >
<img src=”http://eco.netvibes.com/img/add2netvibes.png” mce_src=”http://eco.netvibes.com/img/add2netvibes.png” width=”91″ height=”17″ border=”0″ alt=”Add to netvibes”>
</a>

Pluck:
<a href=”http://client.pluck.com/pluckit/prompt.aspx?GCID=C12286x053&a=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog
&t=TopCat+Blog”><img src=”http://www.pluck.com/images/pluck/pluspluck.png” mce_src=”http://www.pluck.com/images/pluck/pluspluck.png” alt=”Subscribe with Pluck RSS reader” border=”0″ /></a>

My AOL:
<a href=”http://feeds.my.aol.com/add.jsp?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” mce_href=”http://feeds.my.aol.com/add.jsp?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” ><img src=”http://o.aolcdn.com/myfeeds/vis/myaol_cta1.gif” mce_src=”http://o.aolcdn.com/myfeeds/vis/myaol_cta1.gif” alt=”Add to My AOL” border=”0″ /></a>

My MSN:
<a href=”http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id=rss&ut=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog&
ru=http://www.1keydata.com/blog”><img src=”addtomymsn.gif” mce_src=”addtomymsn.gif” border=0 /></a>
(the image can be retrieved from http://rss.msn.com/publisher.armx)

You can also host the images on your own site. I recommend doing this to ensure that your page load time is fast.