How to add a del.icio.us link to your Movable Type blog post

Posted on June 17, 2005 at 07:38 AM

Some of you may be thinking,"What is del.icio.us? Is it some kind of food related web site?" I'm not going to go into great detail here explaining what del.icio.us is and why you should use it, but basically Del.icio.us is a social bookmark manager as you will note in the quote from the del.icio.us about page:

"del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others."

If you're still in the dark, Wikipedia's del.icio.us entry is a good resource for further reading.

A few days ago I added the following code to my Movable Type main index and date-based archive templates:

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>&title=<$MTEntryTitle$>" target="blank">post to del.icio.us</a>

This code will produce a link that will allow your reader to create a del.icio.us link that points directly to your article. The Movable Type <$MTEntryPermalink$> keyword creates the link and <$MTEntryTitle$> creates the title in the del.icio.us link. So all a user has to do is click the link, log into del.icio.us (if they haven't already done so), add a few tags to the entry, and they're done.

Here's where you want to add it in to your main index template (click on image for a larger view):

The above code is the portion of the MT main index template that creates the permalink, author, comments and trackbacks at the end of each post. You could also put the "post to del.icio.us" link under the subject of your post, but for usability sake it would make sense to leave it at the bottom. Reason being is to not make your reader have to scroll back up to the top of the page in order to add your post to their del.icio.us.

Once you've added the code to your main index template, you will also need to add it to your date based and category archives as well. Just remember to rebuild your site when you're finished entering the code into your MT templates if you want the del.icio.us link to appear on every post.

The final result is a neat little tool that allows readers to quickly add your blog post to their del.icio.us link list. The hard part for you will be creating good content that would prompt someone to add you to their del.icio.us. I struggle with that every day.

For all you del.icio.us gurus out there, here's a great article I found detailing everything you ever wanted to know about del.icio.us but were afraid to ask.

Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (2) | post to del.icio.us | submit to Digg