Updated website engine
I’ve updated the engine which drives the website - the CMS for those other web-coders out there.
You’ll not see any obvious changes to the site, other than bookmarking / sharing. However, under the hood there’s been a big update that’s taken me a couple of weeks to implement.
The CMS I use has recently seen a major upgrade and technology makeover. The new version brings many new features, better performance and much more advanced underpinnings.
Currently the only new feature is the previously mentioned bookmarking and sharing. I’ve implemented this with the “Add This” API which provides instant access to several hundred methods of sharing the site’s pages.
The Add This button also has a number of very useful additional features if you’re prepared to sign up for a free account with them and add a little code. Doing this allows you to track the number of times a page on your site is shared and with which service. Turning on tracking also allow you to see how may visitors came back to your site and by which of the shared links.
If you are prepared to do a little more work you can add code to your site to interlink the Add This data with your Google Analytics account. One thing to note though, if you use the latest Google Analytics code you can’t use the standard Google Analytics linkage code on the Add This site. The required code is to be found in this forum post.
Previous content
This is an updated post and the old content has been largely removed as it is no longer relevant. However, I have kept the bit on the Digg network problems that I encountered. I’m not sure if it is still applicable but it might save someone from pulling their hair out…
Implementation with digg.com
If you are implementing digg.com integration (directly to digg’s site) on your own site / blog you might be interested in the problems I had with getting this to work.
On one of my other blogs, the post titles include things like & and , but when I submitted these stories to digg.com’s submission page these characters were not decoded and get left as things like %23. What you are supposed to do, according to digg’s guidelines, is encode your URL and title. This ensures that things like the & and ? don’t get interpreted by the browser as parameters.
The problem is if you submit to www.digg.com/submit the strings are not correctly decoded. It seems that this address is some kind of latency page and if you want the correct URL decode you must submit to digg.com/submit (note the missing www).
I hope this tip will save somebody the frustration I experienced getting this working. It would be nice if digg.com made the address requirements more obvious too.
Posted on Fri 24 Sep 2010 - 16:58