Sociable 2.0 is out!

2.0 contains plenty of new features: 61 sites, subtler icons to avoid clashing with your theme, translation into German, French, Hungarian, and Italian, and more. It lays the groundwork to expand into more languages and more blog engines, so 2007 is going to be bigger than ever.

If you’d like to hear me babble a bit about Sociable, check out this interview. First time I’ve been interviewed.

Sometimes folks ask me if Sociable has a ‘tip jar’ so they could donate to support it. The sites that are on by default have generously sponsored Sociable, so keeping them turned on is a great way for you to support Sociable. Thanks!

Thanks for your patience.

Good thing I did a beta: already fixed a bug, shrunk the Sociable spacing a little, and added two more sites (an even 50!). Please download 2.0 beta 3.

I just released 2.0 beta 4. This fixed two missing icons, drag and drop for some folks, removed a dead site, and tidied a bunch of HTML. Remember, to upgrade: deactivate Sociable, delete the whole folder, upload the new sociable folder from the zip, and re-activate. If anything’s wrong, click ‘Restore Built-in Defaults’, and mail me if that doesn’t work.

New features in this release:

• 23 more sites!
• Italian translation, and room for plenty more
• Icons stay subtle until moused over, then spring to full color, so icons clash less with your blog’s theme
• Even more bugfixes: unusual themes disrupting the display should be less of a problem, and Sociable shouldn’t interfere with your other admin plugins

Now that Sociable supports 48 social bookmarking sites and still has plenty more on the horizon, I have to address the issue of which sites are on by default. I’ve decided to hold an auction: the top five bidding sites, in order, will be on by default in all versions released for at least one year. If you’re interested in this unique opportunity (Sociable automatically checks for new versions and Google shows 1.3 million hits for the help text every Sociable installation displays), please contact me privately for more information. Of course, I’ll still always add sites for free and give them all the same level of usability and support, this is just determines which sites are on by default.

I realize some folks may think I’m being greedy doing this, but I have to limit the number of sites and I’d like to see a return on the time I’ve spent writing, improving, and most of all supporting Sociable. Auctioning a default site selection ensures I can improve Sociable more than I have in the last few months and doesn’t degrade user experience. Thanks for your understanding.

The next version of Sociable is under way. I’ve moving development to Sourceforge so that other folks can get involved, at the moment it’s mostly translation efforts (Spanish, German, Italian, Hungarian, maybe more). And on that note, if anyone has a good tutorial on using gettext in PHP, I’d love a link. I’m stuck on the code, so there’s no development happening at the moment. Frustration!

A lot of web surfers have never heard of social bookmarking sites (SBS). Gasp, shock, horror, not everyone is up-to-date on the web 2.0 meme. I put a little introduction to SBS in the hover text for newbies, and deliberately didn’t make it editable through the admin interface so that it wouldn’t get changed into a thousand variations on “OMG CLIK & MAK MY BLOGG POPULER!”. Users can (and do) edit it in the PHP, but as Sociable users are not especially technically savvy it’s uncommon.

More experienced users say linking to SBS is hammy because not every reader uses them, because the sites provide their own bookmarklets and plugins, etc. I don’t disagree. Sociable exists because blog authors want more traffic and SBS are a great way to get it. Sociable exists for the same reason grocery stores put candy in the checkout lanes and Amazon lets you buy books with one click: as soon as readers finish a post they’re reminded they can share it with others, it’s the web 2.0 equivalent of the impulse buy.

I wrote Sociable because I wanted to add those links to the bottom of my blog posts. I thought writing a WordPress plugin would be fun, and other people might like to use it. With all that in mind, let me talk about the graphic design decisions I made.

By default, Sociable only adds icons to posts when they’re displayed on individual pages and not on the front page, archives, search results, or feeds. A whole lot of users set Sociable to display everywhere with predictably bad results. I added this option because I’ve seen blogs that don’t have (or don’t prefer to use) pages for individual posts, just archive pages. I weighed this decision heavily but decided in this case that it’s better to support more users than stop all users from shooting themselves in the foot. (This option is a pretty good analogy for the different design philosophies behind Unix and OS X.)

The other big default is to show all SBS icons, and it’s getting worse and worse. New SBS contact me about once each week to get added, so pretty soon the default is going to pass from humorous overkill into a sprawling mess. (And let me parenthetically tip my hat to the folks who’ve realized it’s intentionally silly.) I’m not sure what to do about this one yet. If I have them all off by default, I’m going to get inundated with mails from people who’ve installed it and rightly say it doesn’t work out of the box. Bad first experience. If I turn on only the most popular few by default, there’s an ugly “rich get richer” effect. I haven’t thought of a good solution and would appreciate advice.

Lastly, I tried to keep the visual clutter down as much as possible in the default CSS. There’s a caption, and then the icons without adornment, period. The CSS even has to deliberately strip away a lot of visual styling that different blog themes would otherwise add. Most of the noise comes from the fact that the sites’ icons are all visually dissimilar with different color palletes. Any random blog is guaranteed that most of them won’t match the blog theme, let alone each other.

At the moment I’m looking at it as a good incentive for blog owners to prune down the number of sites they display, but it probably needs more help. One user had a creative solution to display icons in grayscale until they’re hovered over, and I’ll include that feature (probably in the next version).

I hope I’ve addressed the valid concerns of critics, and I appreciate any advice for further improvements.

I’ve just fixed a few more WordPress 1.5 bugs to create Sociable 1.2. There are also some css changes so that weird themes do fewer weird things to the display of Sociable (and man, do they do that a lot).

This release of Sociable owes a lot of thanks to Ajay D’Souza for working with me to debug Sociable.

I’m pleased to announce Sociable 1.1, a small bugfix release.

If you find any bugs, please mail me.

This release fixes two bugs that occurred when running WordPress 1.5 or PHP 5. Also, Sociable now checks to make sure that it was uploaded correctly (and provides instructions on how to fix the upload), so if you had problems with images not appearing or appearing as a vertical list, this should help you out. There’s also a minor performance improvement thanks to David Chait.

Lastly, Chris Kasten added co.mments.com to the list of supported sites.

Look for Sociable 2.0 in two or three weeks to support Spanish and German. If you’d like to help out and now a langauge I’d like to hear from you. I’ll also like to add more sites from the list on the Sociable homepage, so watch this blog for detailed instructions on how to help in a few days.

I’ve been quiet the last week because my free time has been taken up by finishing Sociable, a plugin to the WordPress blog software. It’s the reason there are those cute little icons down below this post.

If you find any bugs, please mail me.

There’s not much for me to add to the description I put on its homepage, so let me take a moment to say how nice it is to develop a WordPress plugin. The WP folks clearly took time to make things as easy as possible. It’s easy for PHP to devolve into terrible messes of spaghetti code, but WP’s system of hooks, filters, and options presents a welcoming niche to the aspiring plugin author. Thanks, guys!

I’ve enjoyed developing Sociable so much, I’m wondering what plugin to write next…