Today I’ve been messing around with my blog, creating a social button WordPress Plugin. Determined to make better use of the sites I’m working with, and filtering out the noise that I’m not interested in.

So, as you will see at the top and bottom of this post, I’ve now got buttons for the following:

• RSS
• Delicious
• Twitter
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Technorati
• Dzone

For most people the lack of Digg button will probably ring alarm bells in many heads… I can understand that, but when I look at my stats for the past 2 months, you’d understand why. A mere 0.8% of all traffic to this site comes from Digg, despite posting the same articles there that I post everywhere else – particularly in their “Programming” section. I also received an email from the DZone owners last Friday which stated:

“Digg’s programming-related topics have been dead for more than a year”

This made me think, and looking at the stats – they were right! DZone is roughly 19% of my overall referral traffic to this site, and I had no social buttons here for them, focussing on Digg as my key social button of choice.

Therefore, times are a changing round here, Digg buttons gone, DZone interactive buttons appearing in their place. I’m also paying close attention to my Reddit stats, currently at around 10% of referral traffic, however it so hit and miss there its difficult to tell if it’s worthy of a full on interactive button.

I’ll continue to submit my articles there, in the vague hope that I might attract an eye or two, but that’s as far as it’ll go…

Whilst I think Digg still does show some useful content, it’s extremely difficult for a site like mine to get coverage on the content I am serving. Digg is too maintream tech these days, the launch of jQuery 1.3 being the most popular programming article I can remember recently. I think a Digg button will still have its merits on certain blogs, but for techie/programming blogs, it’s time is up. I can only assume that this will be the case for many categories on Digg in the near future, as it slowly becomes the The National Enquirer of the internet.

Tools to help you learn…

Pro Blogger	Amazon Kindle 2	Learning jQuery 1.3

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 and is filed under Development, Social-Web, WordPress Plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.