Digg Story Button on your site

3-minute read

Probably everyone has seen by now links like “Digg”, “Digg it”, “Digg Story”, on various sites. This will probably change in the future, after the announcement of the new features supported by the Digg API we will see many sites showing on their own pages the cool Digg story button. This is probably one of the most requested features and there were some attempts to use javascript to blend the Digg ranking on a site to overcome this.
The moment I have seen the blog entry by Kevin posted on the official Digg blog, I rushed to test it out.

There are two new features announced, “Submit To Digg improvements” and “Digg Story Button”, but probably the last one will be the most popular one. Basically you can have the cool Digg Story Button on your page by adding a short piece of code on your page:

<script> digg_url = "URL_OF_DIGG_STORY"; </script>
<script src="http://digg.com/api/diggthis.js"></script>

Check out the official post for full details: http://diggtheblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/integrating-digg-within-your-website.html I have submitted this story myself so I can show a live example of this bellow. Check it out at the bottom of this post.

What are the advantages for site publishers to place this on their site?

  • it looks very cool.

  • it should increase the number of votes; if you allow the users to vote directly on the source page it will be more easy for the peoples to vote as opposed to return to the Digg page to do this. This might increase the story chance to hit the Digg frontpage and get a greater exposure.

What are the advantages for Digg?

  • they will probably get many new users this way… users that will see the button and just click on it (thus being redirected to the Digg new user page). I am talking here of users that have not seen or heard of Digg, if there are any :-).

Personally I liked very much this feature, and this shows that the Digg team is continuously working to improve their site. It is very easy to use and very cool.

What personal suggestions I have to improve this?

  • allow us to resize the button. This looks great on Digg, but it might not fit well on all sites.

  • don’t redirect the user on the Digg page when he votes a story. If the user is an existing Digg user and is considered logged in Digg, then it is not necessary to redirect him to the Digg page. For new users or not logged in ones of course they will have to be directed to Digg, but for the rest, maybe it would be nice to have the vote counted exactly as on the Digg page (with the nice js effect).

  • improve the speed. In my experience it takes a few seconds (5-10sec, or even more) to load the button. Still since this is AJAX based the page will load completely and not wait for it, so it is not such a big deal.

Again, excellent work from the Digg team… Keep up the nice new features coming.

And here it is the cool Digg Story Button:

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