Making Sociable More… Sociable

I’ve been using the Sociable WordPress plugin for a while now. It’s a plugin that gives instant links to various social media sites, to help you spread your bloggy goodness around the world. One thing that I love about this plugin is the fact that it shows a tagline before the list of links (just look to the end of this post for what I’m talking about).

For me, this tagline has become something of a… well… tagline. Many people use the default “Share and enjoy” tagline.¹ This is probably because most people see the tagline as an introduction to the “link to social media” function of Sociable. Me? I actually like the semi-Shakespearian “ending of a chapter” feeling that the tagline gives. It’s like a way to tell the reader that we’re at the end of this post, this thought, this… chapter.

When I started using Sociable, I periodically changed the tagline from “Whaddaya think, sirs?” to “Push the button, Frank.” and back again. These are two good “ending taglines” from that greatest of all shows: Mystery Science Theater 3000. Eventually, I got sick of the tagline being the same thing for all posts, and of having to manually change the tagline. So, I thought I’d hack the plugin source to allow for random taglines.

Random Taglines Rule!

Sociable-random's admin page

Thus, I give you the sociable-random plugin. It’s exactly the same as the sociable plugin, except that it allows for multiple taglines and it automatically uses the <strong> tag for those taglines.

At the bottom of this post, you see a tag that has been randomly chosen from about 7 MST3K quotes. You also see the way I formatted the tagline to separate it a bit from the post, while still connecting it to the sociable links. The CSS for this is:

.sociable_tagline {
            padding-bottom: 5px;
            margin-bottom: 3px;
            margin-top: 5px;
            line-height: 1.5em;
}
.sociable_tagline strong {
           border-top: #444 1px solid;
}

Download

Download sociable-random from its archives link on Github. Feel free to let me know what you think, and if something’s broken, either fire a message along on of the various channels you see on the right edge of your screen, or using the Github Issues page.

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1. which is something I’d expect to hear from a space ship’s computer that’s trying to recreate tea, not something I want on my blog. [↩]