“Ooh, sexy title,” is what you’re thinking, I know. Anyway, with my compulsive habit these days of installing WordPress plugins, I downloaded
Social Bookmarks Reloaded. A great start, mind you, but lacking in a couple of areas. The great thing about open source is you don’t have to sit around griping about software not doing what you want. You can go in and fix it to make it do what you want! In this case, my complaints were really nit picks. I didn’t like the fact that the mouse over text (i.e., the alt text) for each bookmark was hard-coded and basically said the same thing for each site (e.g., “Add this to Digg” “Add this to D…e.l.i.c..i..o.u….s…”). I wanted the Digg bookmark to say, “Digg this,” for example. So I added an extra parameter to the xml file that described the bookmarking sites which allows you to put in your own alt text if you wish. Then I invoked the mighty
Vi and made code changes to the plugin to incorporate the new parameter and dynamically create the new alt text for each image. Voila! I’ve got lots more changes I want to make to the plugin, such as adding this description interface to the plugin options interface, and a way to edit the bookmarking sites dynamically, among other things. Once I’m done I’ll re-release the plugin so others can take it and add even more functionality. Vive la Open Source!
