Sexy Bookmarks is a WordPress plugin developed by Josh Jones and Norman Yung that is goaled at providing an attention grabbing menu so that visitors to your WordPress based blog or website can easily bookmark or share your content with their favorite social media bookmarking sites. As you can see from the blog, I am kicking the tires of the Sexy Bookmarks 2.5.3.3.
I learned about this plugin from my WordPress dashboard and kind of cringed my face when I saw the name. The name is not the best of branding and the .COM extension of their domain name actually resolves to a pornography bookmark site of some sort (didn’t stick around to really figure it out). In any event, out of curiosity I clicked through to the plugin’s page on WordPress.Org and based on a review of the page decided to give the plugin a test drive.
Sexy Bookmarks for WordPress
The Sexy Bookmarks Plugin for WordPress is built off of the core of WP Social Bookmark Menu and extended using CSS and some fancy coding to make a unique and compelling bookmark menu. The plugin itself has received a 4.5 star rating on WordPress.Org; yet, does have some documented issues that are generally caused by themes that don’t support some standard WordPress semantics. I installed the plugin on this blog which is a WordPress 2.8.4 at the time of writing this post and using a customized version of Press75’s Urban Elements theme. My installation when down without a glitch. Before you install the plugin, make sure you know how to access your hosting via FTP so that if you do have an issue you can simply delete the plugin files. The Plugin’s authors do seem to be very committed to the plugin via their interaction on their own website with user requests, feature adds, and bug fixes.
The plugin’s settings panel has 33 different social bookmarking sites that can be selected and placed into a menu order on various parts of your website. The settings allow granular control of the DIV which houses the bookmarks and the types of pages you want the bookmarks on (index, page, post, and combinations of the three). If you are looking to add to a template directly, the plugin also supports an inline PHP call. There are several other tweaks including a background image that make the plugin fun.
Graphically, the plugin is great and provides yet another Web 2.0 element to a good theme. For now, I’m going to leave the plugin on my site as it compliments our great Press 75 theme. I’m curious to see how our readers interact and use it; I hope it’s fancy appeal doesn’t confuse anyone. Josh and Norman, thanks for your contribution to WordPress!
Wow… I have to say that is by far the most extensive and in-depth review the plugin has ever had! Most people generally tend to simply copy/paste a few lines from our about page or something similar…
Nevertheless, I certainly appreciate you taking the time to write a full post about our plugin and it’s features as well as tips on how to use it.
Also, regarding the porn thing… Yea, the name may not have been the wisest move I ever made… In fact, as you can see here: http://sexybookmarks.net/sexybookmarks-updates/sexybookmarks-moving-kinda-soon
I intend to get rid of that domain soon. I won’t be changing the name of the plugin, as it’s already been downloaded nearly 50,000 times and I don’t want to lose a userbase that large. However, we will be doing away with the domain which seems to actually lead quite a few people astray to the .com counterpart.
Thanks again!
Josh Jones
Hmm, looks like Twitter won’t let me send you a DM in reply because you’re not currently following me… At any rate, here’s more information about the bug…
You seem to be using the default URL shortener (http://e7t.us) which I run personally. The problem with this is that I just recently attempted an upgrade of the DB and royally fudged things up.
In fact, the issues are so severe, that I won’t be reactivating it. I originally intended to release an update to SexyBookmarks immediately upon discovering what I had done, but I am in the process of adding a very complex new feature that isn’t finished yet. So, if I were to release an update, I would be causing EVEN MORE problems than the amount of people who are still using e7t.us to shorten their Twitter URLs.
You can fix this issue by doing the following:
1. Select a different service from the dropdown list in the SexyBookmarks settings page.
2. Select the “Clear all short URLs” option
3. Save your changes.
This will purge your database of any URLs that have been shortened with the faulty service and then allow them to be shortened again using the new service you picked.
Sorry for the mishap!
Josh, don’t beat yourself up on the branding. Matt Mullenweg himself admits a lesson learned when they did the whole .COM and .ORG thing for WordPress which created a bunch of confusion. After today’s NYTimes article, you’ve got confirmation that a little edginess in the name is good for you.
No problem on the review. Love to reward good work. I write twice as much when I’m pissed off about something! LOL
I’m following you now!
Just completed the steps and passed along to a few friends. Thanks for the details.
Oh wow… I guess even a little crumb dropped on the floor from the NY Times is a pretty big deal! haha
They didn’t even mention the plugin’ s name, but I’ve already seen a flux in traffic spawning from the keyword search “sharing is sexy”!
Thanks for pointing that out!
Oh, and I released an update today that should have fixed the issue.