With the explosion of social media, networking, and bookmarking services, there are a zillion ways to add “Share This Post” functionality to your WordPress-powered sites. In addition to the myriad services and plugins, we can also add these links directly, using nothing more than a little markup and a few choice PHP snippets. Such individual links provide full control over the selection, layout, and styling of each link without requiring the installation of yet another WordPress plugin.

This article shares SEO-friendly code snippets for ten of the most popular social media sites using completely valid XHMTL-Strict markup. All of the following code snippets feature:

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Picture it. You have just prepared some recent snapshots of your buddies from a gathering over the weekend. Special care was taken to choose the images, and resize the images appropriately. As you sign in to your favorite social networking site to upload these images, you realize your credentials are invalid. You type in permutations of your user-name and password, check the “Caps” Key, but find that you are still not allowed access to your account. Your account could be have been hacked, removed, or just made unavailable. The site that you swore would hold and keep your memories, thoughts, feelings, and treasured moments are inaccessible or worse, gone forever. How could this happen? Just as we get attached to material things in life, we become attached to our email, blogs, podcasts, bookmarks, and images. In other words, this is our new digital existence. Some would call it our digital baggage.

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For those of you still hiding your bookmarks within the dark confines of your browser’s “favorites” menu, may I suggest stepping into the “here and now” with a fresh new approach: social bookmarking. Hopefully, most of my readers are already familiar with the many wonders of managing and sharing your bookmarks online, but for those who may still be questioning the whole idea, allow me to expound briefly on several of the immediate benefits:

Universal access to your bookmarked sites

Forget about time-wasting browser extensions that fumble to synchronize your business; manage your collection online at a great site such as del.icio.us and enjoy quick access to a definitive set of bookmarks from virtually anywhere in the world.

Better organization of your bookmarks

Drop the resource-hogging browser extensions that supposedly enhance the organizational efficiency of your collection; many social bookmarking sites employ user-defined tagging architecture to provide unlimited flexibility for organizing your bookmarks.

Don’t be tight with your bookmarks

Sharing information is the wave of the future! Help others locate the information they need by sharing your favorite sites with others. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us provide a simple way to keep select sites private, so get over yourself and get sharing!

One-click backups of your entire collection

Last but not least is the drop-dead simple method that most social-bookmarking sites provide for backing up or exporting your entire bookmark collection. For example, with a single click, del.icio.us exports your entire collection via a nice little html file. Fresh. Delivered.

Ahh.. so much better. If you still don’t believe me, then just stop reading here and go home. However, if you are totally feeling the whole social bookmarking movement, then read on, my friend — I have a few sweet little tips that I would like to share with you..

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Announcing an easy way to export and automatically format your WordPress Blogroll for import into your del.icio.us social bookmarking account!

The Export Blogroll plugin for del.icio.us simplifies the process of transferring your WordPress Blogroll to your del.icio.us account. del.icio.us now provides a way to import multiple links with a single file, however the file must emulate a specific (browser bookmark) format. The Export Blogroll plugin automatically formats your exported Blogroll content according to del.icio.us batch-upload specifications, making it super-easy to import and share your links. The Export Blogroll for del.icio.us plugin provides several export options:

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After our recent WordPress-2.1 blogroll debacle, we concluded that the WordPress Links Manager (aka the Blogroll) is no longer a viable, long-term solution for managing bookmark collections containing large numbers of links. A far better solution, in the eyes of many savvy web users, is the free social bookmarking service del.icio.us. Using del.icio.us for over a year now, we have found it to be highly flexible, always reliable, and infinitely extensible. Plus, as a social bookmark service, everyone benefits from everyone and quality resources are much easier to find. The dec.isio.n to switching from the Blogroll to del.icio.us is, in our opinion, a no-brainer.

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