Add your site to addthis.com

[robotech_master]

Title:
Add your site to addthis.com

Area:
posting

Summary:
Could you go to the following website and use it to submit a listing for Dreamwidth to the AddThis link sharing rouser plug-in? There is a listing for LiveJournal, but not one for Dreamwidth – and since I have Dreamwidth set to cross post to LiveJournal, I'd like to be able to post anything I would want to post there here instead.

http://www.addthis.com/services/submit?

Description:
This would mainly involve making sure that Dreamwidth is Oexchange compatible, and submitting the URL to the site descriptor.

Poll #7708 Add your site to addthis.com

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
6 (14.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
6 (14.0%)

(I have no opinion)
31 (72.1%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[denise]

We do not currently support the APIs they use, so this suggestion should be considered to be for implementing those APIs, not for "hey, site admins, can you go do this".

[msilverstar]

I really hope the Dreamwidth API can be expanded appropriately for more compatibility.

[denise]

We are totally 100% in favor of being more compatible whenever and wherever possible! We just have to carefully balance the question of "which APIs should we support", since APIs are like rabbits, or sock yarn stash: they breed when you're not watching them.

[kyrielle]

I...have no idea what this would mean for the site or the users, from what you posted. What does this service do? What's the benefit, and how do users use it, and why?

I think I finally found it digging through their site - one page away from giving up and wandering off - not my cup of tea, but okay.

[jumpuphigh]

+1 - Except for the digging through their site part.

[pauamma]

Did you save the URL by any chance?

[kyrielle]

I didn't, but now knew where to click to get back to it quickly. It's http://www.addthis.com/features - I assume adding Dreamwidth would add it to the "easy share" options on sites using the tool.

[pauamma]

Thanks. I'm not sure, reading that page, why I would want tp use it. (When I want to share something, I'm most likely to paste it in IRC, or sometime to post about it somewhere.)

[robotech_master]

I use it all the time for articles I'd like to share places. Not everything has a share-on-facebook link. Sometimes I'd really like to share an article to my personal journal so I can write more about it than Facebook allows, and if I wanted to post it to my LJ I could do that...but I use Dreamwidth because a post there goes to both my DW and my LJ. I'd like to be able to do the same sort of two-click sharing to my DW that I could do to LJ.

(Yes, I know I could just fire up Semagic and write a post there, but in practice that's a lot less convenient than just clicking a couple of times so I don't end up doing it.)

[matgb]

I'm in favour of it in principle, however...

LJ has a JS bookmarklet that takes you to a popup update window with minimal site chrome, that I found useful on occasions. Theoretically we could have similar here but it's actually beyond my copy/paste/edit skills to get it working (I've tried, JS not my thing).

Would a bookmarklet be more useful to you, or do you use addthis from browsers you can't add such things to? (I've always found it intrusive m'self, but it must be popular)

[robotech_master]

I like AddThis because it lives in my Google Chrome plug-ins bar, and I just click once to open a tray, then click again to share stuff to places. I suppose I could use a bookmarklet too, but I already have so many bookmarks it would be more like "click, hunt through two overly long bookmark lists, click" and a lot less convenient.

(I'm more than a little surprised that DW doesn't have the API to support AddThis. LiveJournal does, and I thought DW was supposed to be compatible with but better than LJ.)

[denise]

DW forked its code from LJ in late 2008. Anything LJ has added since then, we don't have unless we specifically code-merged it (and since our code has diverged sharply enough since then that it can't be merged automatically, this takes a bunch of work).

That having been said, I may be wrong about DW not supporting the API that AddThis uses. Someone with more technical understanding would need to do some research.

[matgb]

Ah, I have a bookmarklets folder in my toolbar so they're easier for me than owt else, and didn't know there was an addthis plugin, I've only ever seen it on sites, so we learn stuff.

IT's possible DW does support the API, or it's also possible that LJ is so big AddThis rewrote their stuff to specifically support it (this isn't uncommon, LJ is known, DW isn't so much).

It's also possible that DW did support the API, but the code itself was reliant on some really bad code and got yanked at some point during a cleanup, the ongoing process of rewriting everything so it's up to date compatible code is something beyond my ken, but impressive to see.

It's even possible that the supporting code isn't in the LJfree depository, some of the LJ codebase isn't open source so DW can't use it.

But we don't know, hopefully someone that knows that area of code will be along at some point.