The uber geeks

Useless Digg buttons on blogs

Written by Josue Salazar on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 5:08 am. Josue lives in the beautiful country of Costa Rica where he downloads TV shows via BitTorrent.

I’m sure we’ve all seen those blogs that have a link to every bookmarking site after every single post. That’s alright, it doesn’t bother me much since I never use them. However I just tried to use one submit a story and had an issue doing it.

I was reading a good post, and wanted to add it to Digg. I clicked on the little button willing to submit it, but I was told the story already existed on the site. Nice. What annoys me though, is the fact that I was asked to submit the story to Digg when the story was already submitted. Why wasn’t the Digg link just a link to the story, or even cooler, a real connection to Digg so I could digg the story without going to Digg (it’s possible, I’ve seen it done).

The thing is, those Add to Digg buttons on every article on a blog are most likely created by a plugin, and right now the plugin only creates a link to submit the story. Wouldn’t it be freaking cool for someone to create a plugin that checked Digg and if the story already existed it would at least link to it?. I guess it would be pretty hard to do, it would be quite a strain for the server and slow down the page probably.

I can dream though, right?.
P.S.: Sorry for the continued use of the word Digg in this post, and sorry for the 3 posts this week about social bookmarking sites.

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Reader feedback

  1. Gravatar

    I’m not a fan of those buttons at all (for any service, not just Digg). I’m of the mind set that if a person uses one of those services, they’ve already got a means of bookmarking, tagging, etc. via bookmarklet or browser plugin without needing you to provide buttons for them. They mostly just clutter things up.

    There is a Digg plugin for WordPress that adds a “Digg this” link to a post that has already been submitted. I use it on my site to let Digg users know it’s already on Digg and they can digg it if they want. Makes more sense to me than adding a “submit to Digg” button which is rendered useless once the story has been submitted, as you pointed out.

    Matt Brett on July 28th, 2006 8:37 am

  2. Gravatar

    How Crabapple.cc Could be Better than Digg

    Okay, so it already is. But I know how Mr. Crabapple loves coding things, and basically- this is a darn good idea. If he hurries, he can code it before Digg finds out about the idea.

    http://crabapple.cc on August 1st, 2006 12:52 pm

  3. Gravatar

    There is a Feedflare that does this too. I’m using it on this post (sorry it’s crowded - I’m experimenting)

    http://archshrk.com/2006/07/steel-welding-process-underway-for-the-skywalk-at-grand-canyon-west/

    It says “Digg This!” until someone diggs it and then it shows how many duggs it has.

    archshrk on August 1st, 2006 3:03 pm

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