How to Add digg and del.icio.us Buttons / Links to Movable Type Blog

Do you know what digg and del.icio.us are? If not, you’re like I was a few months ago, and you might be confused by the links/buttons on this site that say “digg it!” or “add to del.icio.us.”

As the digg website says:

Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see.

What can you do as a digg user? Lots. Every digg user can digg (help promote), bury (help remove spam), and comment on stories… you can even digg and bury comments you like or dislike. Digg also allows you to track your friends’ activity throughout the site — want to share a video or news story with a friend? Digg it!

Or in other words, you create a profile on digg, and then you can “digg” or add your vote to an article to say it’s an article you like. The more “diggs” or votes an article gets, the more it is promoted on the digg website which means it’s going to get more traffic. If you can manage to get a lot of diggs to a webpage you’ve created then you’ll get a lot of traffic. Hello interesting twist for SEO professionals.

So you want to add a digg link or a button to you blog posts in Movable Type? Here’s the code to do it:

<a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>" title="Submit <$MTEntryTitle remove_html="1"$> to DIGG" class="link-this" target="_blank">Can you digg it?</a>

Add this to you main index, category index, and individual archive index templates, and make it easy for people to digg your blog posts.

del.icio.us is a website where you can store bookmarks. You know how you have your bookmarks in your browser? Why store them there? Store them on a website and then if you switch computers or are using someone else’s computer you can always access your bookmarks without having to transfer them. Plus you can share your bookmarks easily with someone else. My bookmarks are at http://del.icio.us/donloper. See? It’s easy. You can subscribe to someone else’s bookmark list so that whenever they add a new link you’re informed of it. You can even add buttons to Firefox that make it super easy to add a new page to your del.icio.us profile.

Here’s the code to add a link in your Movable Type posts to make it easy for people to add your page to del.icio.us.

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>&title=<$MTEntryTitle encode_url="1"$>">Bookmark This</a>

Enjoy.