In addition to your choice collection of “Share This” links, you may also want to provide visitors with a link that enables them to quickly and easily send the URL permalink of any post to their friends via email. This is a great way to increase your readership and further your influence. Just copy & paste the following code into the desired location in your page template:
<a href="mailto:?subject=Fresh%20Linkage%20@%20Perishable%20Press&body=Check%20out%20<?php the_permalink(); ?>%20from%20Perishable%20Press" title="Send a link to this post via email" rel="nofollow">Share this post via email</a>
Within the code, you will need to edit both instances of the string “Perishable%20Press” to reflect your own site name. Note that the “%20” is the encoded equivalent of a blank space, and is required to ensure validation of parameterized query strings. As is, the code will generate an email that is populated with the following information:
When building web pages, it is often necessary to add links that require parameterized query strings. For example, when adding links to the various validation services, you may find yourself linking to an accessibility checker, such as the freely available Cynthia service:
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:
Recently, I received a bizarre email accusing me of calling someone out on their fake Feedburner subscriber count. Apparently, some desperate blogger had been claiming to have something like 30,000 Feedburner subscribers when in reality they only had around 700. From what I could tell, the fraudulent site was displaying a counterfeit Feedburner subscriber-count badge using some fancy CSS image-replacement or something. Whatever. I really could care less, but the information contained in the email got me thinking:
Providing an easy way for visitors to verify your subscriber count is a good idea..
Enabling visitors to quickly and easily verify your claimed subscriber count fosters a sense of credibility and legitimacy concerning you and your site. Especially for larger feed counts, validating your claim removes doubt, improves perception, and solidifies reputation. Without some sort of verification, new visitors to your site have no practical way of determining the validity of your claim. Reassuring your guests with an official “verification” link is an excellent way to demonstrate your authenticity and sincerity. Users may or may not actually click on the link, but its mere presence provides a clear signal of your site’s integrity. You know, like saying “look, this is the real McCoy — I’m not faking popularity for personal gain.”
Consider the Google home page — arguably the most popular, highly visited web page in the entire world. Such a simple page, right? You would think that such a simple design would fully embrace Web Standards. I mean, think about it for a moment.. How would you or I throw down a few lists, a search field, and a logo image? Something like this, maybe:
Just a quick tip on how to create error-free links to feed validation services for feeds that are redirected through Feedburner. For example, let’s say our site’s main feed is originally located at:
http://domain.tld/feed/
If we wanted to provide our visitors with a link that would enable them to automatically validate our feed using a free service such as feedvalidator.org1, we would create the link as follows:
Keeping track of your access and error logs is a critical component of any serious security strategy. Many times, you will see a recorded entry that looks legitimate, such that it may easily be dismissed as genuine Google fare, only to discover upon closer investigation a fraudulent agent. There are many such cloaked or disguised agents crawling around these days, mimicking various search engines to hide beneath the radar. Thus, it is a good idea to implement a procedure for scanning and checking select agents for authenticity. In general, the verification process involves a “forward/reverse” DNS lookup, which is then cross-verified with the search engine in question. Let’s have a quick look at how to do this..
First, visit and bookmark the following articles (and/or this article). These resources explain how to identify and verify the agents for each of the four major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live, and Ask.
[Edit] Note to WP 2.0.5 users: Everything was working fine on this site before upgrading to WP 2.0.5. After upgrading, apparently, our feeds stopped validating* and the BDP RSS Aggregator plugin refused to update our own feeds. After several hours investigating the situation, we determined that the Live Comment Preview plugin was interfering with our feeds validating, while the upgraded WordPress (2.0.5) was responsible for problems with the BDP plugin.
Comment by m0n on Wednesday 6 December 2006 at 4:28 am
I was running BDPRSS v.0.2.2 just fine before upgrading to WP 2.0.5. After the upgrade, I noticed that feeds from my own site are no longer updated. They are apparently polled, but reflect a ‘last updated’ value of the day I upgraded WP. I have, since the WP upgrade, posted several new articles that appear fine directly, through feedburner, etc.
I have tried just about everything (restoring old BDP databases, deleting and adding new feed entries in the admin panel, deleting cache, you name it, etc.). I have also tried upgrading to BDP 0.4.10, but to no avail. My own feeds will not update either in the BDP admin panel or on the web page itself. Adding different feed formats does not work either.
So, just a note to hopefully garner some more clues concerning this. I realize it may not be an emergency, because who reads their own feeds for crying out loud. Perhaps there are others out there with the same problem. If possible, try adding any of your own feeds (on WP 2.0.5) and see if they work. Well, thanks for listening!
The whole event pretty much zapped the weekend of any free-time, but the good news is that we managed to get everything working properly (according to our needs) once again — feeds all validate and we have previews of our own feeds via the BDP plugin — and we are still running WP 2.0.5! We’ll just bill the incident as another 8-hour "learning experience"..
If anyone is experiencing anything similar to the issues mentioned in this post, we would love to hear about it — drop us a line!
Update: [ May 28th, 2007 ] - Issue resolved! After moving the Perishable Press website to a new server, our WordPress feeds once again began updating directly through our own site (via BDP plugin, et al). Apparently, as our previous host continued to disable important PHP functions (as a solution to potential security vulnerabilities), the various plugins and scripts employing the disabled functions inevitably became useless. Thus, we attribute the source our non-updating feed issue directly to server limitations (and lazy technicians). While we cannot at this point discern exactly the cause of the problem, suffice it to say that our new host provides all the functionality needed for everything to run properly (and smoothly, we might add). So cheers to everyone who helped us with suggestions and ideas for this bizarre dilemma. We now enjoy fully functional and validating WordPress feeds. Case closed.
![[ ~{*}~ ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/2009/misc-chunks/email-permalinks.gif)
In addition to your choice collection of “Share This” links, you may also want to provide visitors with a link that enables them to quickly and easily send the URL permalink of any post to their friends via email. This is a great way to increase your readership and further your influence. Just copy & paste the following code into the desired location in your page template:![[ ~{*}~ ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/2008/misc-chunks/social-media-deco.gif)
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 ![[ Count Chimpula ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/2008/misc-chunks/verify-feedcount.jpg)
Recently, I received a bizarre email accusing me of calling someone out on their fake Feedburner subscriber count. Apparently, some desperate blogger had been claiming to have something like 30,000 Feedburner subscribers when in reality they only had around 700. From what I could tell, the fraudulent site was displaying a counterfeit Feedburner subscriber-count badge using some fancy CSS image-replacement or something. Whatever. I really could care less, but the information contained in the email got me thinking: