Yahoo has officially launched their new beta social news service called Yahoo Buzz. While it’s nothing new in that it’s a Digg style social news site where members are allowed to submit and vote on popular articles, the one thing that separates Yahoo Buzz from all the other Digg clones is that if an article gets popular enough, it will actually hit the front page of Yahoo. Yes, you read that correctly, the most popular articles will actually hit the Yahoo homepage.
Some guy posted an article detailing how to add a Yahoo Buzz button to your blog posts the hard way but for those of you who don’t mind popping open your favorite PHP editor and tinkering with your Wordpress theme, here’s an automated way to add a Yahoo Buzz button to every post on your blog.
First, you’ll need to visit this page and get the code for one of the Yahoo Buzz buttons. The code I chose, that you can see at the bottom of each article post looks like this…
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://d.yimg.com/ds/badge2.js" badgetype="square">
ARTICLEURL
</script>
You can see the ARTICLEURL tag which is where we will need to insert the url of our story to be added to Yahoo Buzz. This is simple using Wordpress built-in function the_permalink() which simply echoes out the article permalink when called within “the loop”.
To add it to your blog, open your theme’s index.php file and find the spot in the loop where you want to add the button and simple paste this code in that spot…
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://d.yimg.com/ds/badge2.js" badgetype="square">
<?Php the_permalink(); ?>
</script>
If you’re unfamiliar with the Wordpress loop, it is usually the code inside the open and close sections, symbolized by “….” as shown below…
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
….
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
Additionally, Yahoo Buzz allows other data about an article such as the headline and a summary of the article. If you wish to send a headline or an article title, you can experiment with the Wordpress functions get_the_title() and get_the_content() to pass those values on to the script.
If you have any questions about how to implement this, please feel free to use the comments for this article and I’ll be happy to assist you in any way possible to add the Yahoo Buzz button to your site.
Oh, and if you found this article useful, please don’t forget to Buzz it by clicking the button below.
Very useful post, thank you.
As requested, I have just submitted this post to Yahoo Buzz. The good news is that you don’t have to register if you already have a yahoo account and that is pretty neat.
wow this is great!
Its a little incredible that someone could get a article on the front page of Yahoo.
It would probably take a lot of ” diggs “
can we compare the traffic a blog or website will recieve when it hits first page on Digg and first page on yahoo? i guess propeller works in a similar fashion. Thanks for the great post!
and yes…thanks for the wordpress code!
Thanx for the code, I actually never heard of the Yahoo buzz and it’s interesting that Yahoo are giving this a try, maybe it was the reason they didn’t sell there website to microsoft because they are going to improve there business.
You’re welcome. I think Wordpress webmasters should become familiar with editing their themes which is why I prefer to use self-coded hacks instead of plugins.
Yahoo buzz works wonders for traffic. So far I’ve submitted four stories (trying not to overdo it) and each time I was rewarded with about the same amount of traffic as when you first add a site to Stumbleupon (arounf 150 uniques). I hope that’s not just because buzz is new !!
the great part of this is the ease to login to to the service especially if you already have a yahoo e-mail address. doesn’t everybody have a Yahoo e-mail address?
The Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark plugin already has Buzz in the menu:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-to-any/
Surprised you don’t have it yet because you have the Add to Any Subscribe plugin above. ;)
-Ben
Thanks for bringing that to my attention Ben. I’m using Add to Any primarily for RSS feed subscription but not for social bookmarking. I’m sure using the tip I provided here for adding the Yahoo Buzz widget in the Wordpress loop, one could accomplish the same thing by using the Add to Any social bookmarking tool.
thanks for the codes, I was using a wp-plugin that put the buzz button at the bottom of my posts, which really sucked.