Get the Semiologic Bookmark Me plugin for WordPress, install as per instructions and check that it works.

Open the sem-bookmark-me.php file and admire the neat code – no seriously – one look at the code told me we could do this without breaking a sweat or your blog for that matter.

(If you don’t have Dreamweaver or some other web editor or ftp job installed, in the WordPress admin area go : Manage >> Files, scoll down to the ‘Other Files’ block and enter ‘ wp-content/plugins/sem-bookmark-me/sem-bookmark-me.php’ in the text box provided and click ‘edit’. Make the changes described below and click ‘Update File’ to save it when you are done.)

Bookmark Me does already have pretty solid list of important bookmarking and aggregation services but you may want to add a new or local service not included yet, otherwise you’d probably not be reading this.

You can go to the information pages, help section or support forum of the bookmarking service you want to integrate – in muti’s case, uhm good luck, it’s not so much a case of RTFM (Read The F-ing Manual) as WTFM! (Where’s The F-ing Manual!) ;-)

- or you can ‘cheat’. I very briefly went to to muti.co.za to try and find out how links should be submitted but reading is not one of my strong points, I’m better at looking at the pictures :-).

I decided to take the quick route. Having seen a submit-to-muti button on a few sites I right-cliked on one of them and copied the link location to then come and paste it here for us to try and make some sense of it…

‘http://www.muti.co.za/submit?url=http://www.webaddict.co.za/&title=webaddict’

That looks pretty straight forward actually. It has a link url that will do the talking to muti, that is the ‘http://www.muti.co.za/submit’ part. It also has what you could call a ‘payload’ if you wanted to sound all ominous about it, or a ‘query string’ if technical.

Basically this is the stuff muti needs to know about your blogpost to help make you famous. That is the actual web address that must be bookmarked and the human-friendly title of the particular handful of electrons to be passed on to the waiting crowds.

In the sem-bookmark-me.php file you’ll see a bunch of almost similar repeating lines of code, just after the comments, select one of those arrays, e.g.

'delicious' => array(
     'name' => 'del.icio.us',
     'url' => 'http://del.icio.us/post?title=%title%&url=%permalink%'
     ),

Copy and paste it so you end up with a duplicate…

$bookmark_sites = array(
    'delicious' => array(
       'name' => 'del.icio.us',
       'url' => 'http://del.icio.us/post?title=%title%&url=%permalink%'
       ),
   'delicious' => array(
       'name' => 'del.icio.us',
       'url' => 'http://del.icio.us/post?title=%title%&url=%permalink%'
        ),
   'digg' => array(…

Now you have to modify one of those to do your bidding with the social network of your choice. I haven’t looked into the Bookmark Me code any deeper than what’s listed above. It seems to suggest that Bookmark Me uses a neat little value placeholder that will be replaced by the actual information, %title% for your post’s title and %permalink% for your posts’s actual URI, or address. Geez this web tech stuff is difficult – isn’t it just.

So for Muti we’ll make that first bit of code look like this

'muti' => array(
     'name' => 'muti',
     'url' => ' http://www.muti.co.za/submit?title=%title%&url=%permalink%'
     ),

One thing to be careful of when shuffling your bits of code around is that ‘&
‘ character in the original link. It becomes

'&'

- if you don’t do that you may end up blowing up a piece of the internet and kill sixteen fairies, or something like that.

You will also need a little graphic to identify the service you are adding. There may already be a standard but you can also roll your own, or modify the existing graphics in the img folder inside the Bookmark Me plugin’s folder. Dunno why you’d want to do that though – these things presumably work because they are recognizable – I’ve even managed to resist the temptation of converting the whole lot of them to greyscale – uhm okay I didn’t :-/ (One day I’ll post a tutorial on using Photoshop’s amazing and much under-valued ability to record macros, called ‘actions’ and ‘File >> Automate >> batch’)

Or you can grab this one – right click and save image.

Make sure your graphic has exactly the same name as the stuff you put between the quote marks in front of the arrow formed by the equal sign and corner bracket i.e. ‘this_stuff’ =>…

And that it is uploaded to the ‘img’ folder inside the ‘sem-bookmark-me’ folder, inside the ‘plugins’ folder, inside the ‘wp-content’ folder inside the folder, okay directory that hosts your WordPress stuff.

Now upload your edited sem-bookmark-me.php file, or save it if you’ve been editing it though WordPress’s editing facility.

Browse to one of your posts to see if it is still working.

Now you can go into your WordPress backend, to Options >> Bookmark Me and you should be able to select your new button. Do so and submit your changes by clicking submit.

Chances are this is all you need to do and if all went well well and you didn’t stuff p anything along the way your new button will pose all invitingly alongside the old buttons on your posts.

If it doesn’t, it may be because you have a cache plugin like wp-cache installed, if so go to its options and select ‘delete cache’. Go check again.

That should be it I think. Please let me know how it goes.

Any critique, corrections, questions, suggestions, comments or God-forbid praise… please use the comments form below.

Me, I’m now going to click on my new muti link to see if it works.