As content developers we are always trying to find ways to attract visitors to our pages.

One of the nice ways we can do this is by giving our visitors the ability to quickly post backlinks and announcements on social and directory networks when they like what they have read. This is where the Sociable Plugin for WordPress really shines.

With about 100 optional sites you can insert links to all of the popular social networks. When a visitor who belongs to one of these sites wants to give your post a bump they click on the icon and are taken to the social network with predefined fields and urls all ready to be submitted.

If you know of a site that isn’t on the list its not that hard to add them. Just find an appropriate ico file for the site and enter all the appropriate information in the plugin code.

The plugin will automatically insert the list you select on the bottom of your posts but you can use php within your post loop to place the button bar where you like it.

Sociable is free to use but considering all of the hours that went into finding and setting up the code (try to add a couple buttons manually and you will see) its cool if you send the author a donation so they can keep updating the code.

In wordpress 2.7 or higher you can install from your plugin settings page or you can visit

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

Author: Joost de Valk
http://yoast.com/