Add Social Networks Buttons to Your WordPress.com Posts

There is a great post on how to add a collection of social network buttons to your wordpress.com posts here. I struggled with the process at first, but with the help of another commenter on the post I finally realised where I was going wrong. I have clarified the process on the original post. But as it is quite busy with comments, I thought I would re-list the steps here.

Mamado, author of the original post, created the all important autohotkey (.ahk) file. One of the other commenters on the post is hosting the file, and another commenter helped clarify the slight error in the original instructions. AutoHotKey itself is freeware.

Here now is the step-by-step process to add some social network buttons to your wordpress.com posts!

1. Download AutoHotKey from http://www.autohotkey.com
2. Download socialsignature.zip  from http://www.abbydonkrafts.com/_external/files/socialsignature.zip
3. Install AutoHotKey on your computer
4. Extract the “social.ahk” file from its .zip file
5. Right-click the “social.ahk” file and then click “Compile Script” on the pull-down menu. This will create “social.exe”
6. Now double (left) click “social.exe” to put it onto your system tray
7. Find out the complete address of your blog entry. If you have already published the entry, it will be the Permalink address for it.If you haven’t published it, you can manually input the “Post Slug”. So, if you were to create an entry titled “This is a test post”, you would enter “this-is-a-test-post” into the Post Slug box.The rest of the address will be your blog address and the date. So the complete post address might look like this for example: http://egunjobi.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/this-is-a-test-post/
   
8. Once you have the complete address, right-click on the AutoHotKey icon in the system tray and choose “Social Signature”
9. In the first box that pops up, enter the complete address as explained above
10. In the second box that comes up, enter in the title you want to be used when someone chooses an icon. For example: Bola’s Blog – This is a test post
11. When you have confirmed the box, the complete code will be in your clipboard
12. On the Write page of your Post, go to the Code tab. At the bottom of the code, add a couple of blank lines. And then paste in the social code from your clipboard with CTRL+V
13. Save and publish the post to see the results. The buttons may look all crunched together in the Visual tab; but they’ll be more spread out when you view the published blog
14. If you want to modify the way it is displayed, such as adding spacing characters like “::”, you can edit the script and add them after the /a tags
15. That’s it!!

See an example of the results here: