DotNetKicks with WordPress
You’ll probably notice I’ve added the DotNetKicks “Kick it” icon to the bottom of each post. For those of you who aren’t aware, DotNetKicks is a relatively new social linking site, like Digg, but specific to .NET programming. Cool! This blog is about 80% about .NET programming too. What a great match!
They have a script that you can use to insert the icon into each post. But, I’m relatively lazy. I want to just insert something into WordPress and have it “just work.” So, I went looking for a plug-in or something.
What I found was a guy who’d figured a way to get the code snippet into live writer. But, you still have to insert the tag. However, he did have a plug-in that gave me most of what I needed.
By looking at the source for the plug-in, I was able to figure out that all I really needed to do to get the kickit icon to display is to go insert a small chunk of code in one of my theme files.
If I were a better PHP programmer, I’d turn this into a plug-in too. But, I’m not, so here’s the code you need to insert if you are a blogger writing about .NET stuff and want the Kick it icon too:
<a href=”http://www.dotnetkicks.com/kick/?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>”><img src=”http://www.dotnetkicks.com/Services/Images/KickItImageGenerator.ashx?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>” border=”0″ alt=”kick it on DotNetKicks.com” /></a>
Obviously, if you like something here, go ahead and kick it up.
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December 28th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Terrific job, thank you for figuring this out!
Note that if you copy your sample above and paste it directly into WordPress, it will not work, because the double quotes appear as forward/back quotes in your blog. If you manually change them back to double quotes in the WordPress theme editor, your sample works great.
Note this issue will affect any source code that appears in your blog. Fortunately, there is a WordPress “Untexturize” plug-in that will prevent WordPress from making these unwanted quote character substitutions. For more information:
http://www.devtopics.com/blogging-tips-for-developers/
December 28th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Jon Galloway wrote a neat article about this using Javascript alone:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2007/03/08/adding-a-dotnetkicks-image-via-javascript.aspx
This is a nice way to do it and you can just edit your Post page. The code is also completely transferable since it’s javascript
.
December 28th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
@Rob – wouldn’t Jon’s technique only work if you were viewing the actual post itself, and not via feed readers, aggregated views, or category views? (To name a few)
Still a great solution if you aren’t allowed to edit the theme.
December 28th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
You can do the same thing in DasBlog very easily:
http://www.vonsharp.net/HowToEasilyAddADotNetKicksButtonToDasBlog.aspx
June 12th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Also, if you want a custom colorization, you do not have to modify your CSS. Instead, go to the Dot Net Kicks site and use the tool there to generate the button the way you want it. Then, you can simply copy the stylings from the IMG tag and append them in the above code immediately following the call to get_permalink().
Thanks!
March 30th, 2009 at 4:24 am
oh, useful plugin, thanks for sharing!