Last night, as part of the rebuild of this site, I reinstated the social sharing links for each post. In the old site they had been implemented as bespoke code using each social network’s recommended approach (e.g. Twitter or Facebook‘s official button codes) but presentation becomes problematic, with each button having a slightly different format and needing some CSS trickery to get it right.

I looked into a variety of plugins but they all had issues – either with formatting or functionality – until I stumbled across reference to WordPress.com’s social sharing capabilities.  If only I could have that functionality on a self-hosted (WordPress.org) site…

…As it happens, I can – WordPress.com’s social sharing is based on the ShareDaddy plugin, which is part of a collection called JetPack. ShareDaddy is also available as a freestanding plugin but now I have JetPack installed I’m finding some of the other functionality it gives me useful (and it’s not possible to activate ShareDaddy if you have JetPack installed).

I need to make some changes (like working out how to hack the code and turn off the count next to my Tweet/Like/+1 buttons – it’s embarrassing when the number is small!) but I’m happy enough with the result for now.  One thing I did need to do though was to add some services that are not yet in the JetPack version of the plugin (one of the major advantages of ShareDaddy is how simple it is to do this).

• The first service I added was Google +1, for which Di Turner has produced a plugin to extend ShareDaddy.
• The other important one for me is LinkedIn (it’s in ShareDaddy but not yet in the JetPack version). Ryan Markel has created a post to describe the process for adding custom sharing services (Paul Robert Lloyd’s social media icons are useful for this) and he’s listed the settings for some services. Brad Dalton has listed some more, including LinkedIn (the one I needed).
• Finally, I found a forum post from airodyssey with details of an improved Print option, using the PrintFriendly service.