dhvrm

I agree 100 percent. Please, for the love of all things decent and true, do not abandon developing this plugin!

This problem has been resolved in Firefox 3.0.11, which was released on June 12. Note that the problem was not with Gears or WordPress, but with Firefox.

If you have Firefox set to check for automatic updates, it should have updated by now, you can re-install / re-enable Gears. Otherwise, download and install the update, then enable / reinstall Gears.

Sure enough, Gears was the culprit on my end.

The primary benefit of Gears is that WordPress admin is made a bit quicker and easier on your server by using Gears.

Basically, Gears allows a Web server to offload some of the work running a Web site — such as databases, processing of certain requests, etc. — to your computer. This lessens the workload on the server and increases the response times you see.

Disabling Gears disables the “Turbo” features of WordPress. You may see slower performance on the administrative end as a result.

I’m not involved in the development of this plug-in; I’m just trying to note issues as I discover them.

I’m not sure what you mean by “arrow.gif”. I don’t see it in sociable.css; it appears to me that style is specific to your theme.

To remove an icon, log in to WP admin, click Settings, click Sociable, uncheck any items you don’t want shown, click the Save button.

You should not use align=”center”. All align attributes are depricated in the HTML4 specification and are illegal in the XHTML 1 specifications.

Instead, open the sociable.css stylesheet in wp-content/plugins/sociable and find the declaration for div.sociable.

Add to that this line of CSS:
text-align: center;

Note, however, that linking your bookmarks to your blog’s base URL will likely cause your bookmarks to be rejected by many providers (such as Digg) or reported by other users.

This thread is heading way off topic, so this will be my final reply.

The short answer is yes, adding a link to just about any social bookmarking site must be done manually.

All Sociable does is give you icons that, if a user clicks on one, will take them to the appropriate social bookmarking Web site and fill in the appropriate form for the user. It is up to the user to then submit the form.

There is no practical way to “automatically” submit your posts to most social bookmarking sites.

All the good social bookmarking sites have anti-robot measures, such as CAPTCHA, to prevent bookmark spamming. And yes, automatically creating social bookmarks of your own posts is spamming.

You might be able to develop code that allows you to automatically add social bookmarks to your own accounts on the various bookmarking sites. However, it sounds like you have already encountered the problems such a program would face: It’s going to be unreliable and it’s going to be expensive to create / maintain. About the time your developer figures out how to defeat a site’s anti-robot measures, they will figure out a new way to block your robot.

The idea behind social bookmarking is simple: I look at something on the Web that I did not create. I decide it is interesting. I add it to Digg or a similar site, or I rate it at Yahoo! Buzz or a similar site.

My friends on the bookmarking site see that I liked that content. They look at it. Then they bookmark or rate it.

The process is repeated. Therefore, the Web as a whole rates good content.

All Sociable does is make it easier for people to bookmark your posts if they like them. A system that takes away the independent nature of social bookmarking certainly defeats the intent of social bookmarking, if not the purpose.

One more thought:

If the above does not work, you probably need to edit your template as described in the link you posted.

Basically, Sociable automatically fills in the appropriate form on the selected bookmarking site.

Most bookmarking sites require users to register. Most require those users to log in before they add bookmarks.

Let’s suppose I click the Digg icon on one of your posts. If I am not logged in to Digg, I will be prompted to log in. If I am logged in, or I log in after being prompted to do so, I see a form that allows me to add a bookmark. The form is filled in with the needed information from your post (its title, its URL, etc.).

It is up to me to submit the form by clicking a button.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to completely automate the submission of WordPress blog posts to social bookmarking sites, due to the user account / login requirements almost all of them have.

You can simply run both plug-ins at once, you know.

The developer says “upgrade to latest version.”

In a previous entry, the developer says upgrade to latest version.

I have explained how to do this here:

https://www.dougv.com/blog/2008/08/29/more-sociable-hacks-adding-myspace-and-yahoo-buzz-changing-the-look/

I see the links fine as well, both IE 7.0.6 and Firefox 3.0.1