Periodic Fable

I’ve been looking for a really good way to provide a mechanism that allows readers to share the content on my website. I’ve tried a variety of WordPress apps, but none of them work very well.

Now I’ve installed Wibiya (see the toolbar below) which so far works well.

It’s a toolbar allowing visitors to quickly do a number of actions. It is customizable so one can add a variety of different applications  to it, e.g., Facebook fan page connection and other social media tools.

On my toolbar I’ve enabled a number of applications including:

• Connect – readers can connect to their own social media without leaving the site (so long as you don’t mind allowing another application to link with your accounts, which may be a barrier)
  
• Search – allows readers to search your blog (or the web) via Google
• Recent Posts
• Real Time Users – shows readers how many other people are online and what they’re reading
• Subscribe – this lets you subscribe to my RSS feed
• Smart Share – my favourite app, and something I’ve been looking for for a while – it allows readers to share my posts including on social bookmarking sites, twitter, facebook and via email
• Twitter – this shows my Twitter stream and the ability to tweet a link out about my page without leaving my website
  
• @Anywhere – which connects directly to Twitter and makes any Twittername I mention a direct link, such as @wibiya
  

Please let me know if you particularly dislike toolbars like this on a website.  I don’t want to put people off, just provide extra tools. Some say it slows loading, but I haven’t found that yet…