In alphabetical particular order:

A List Apart

A List Apart isn’t so much a blog as a web magazine (they print new content based on issue numbers). However, when it comes to being a helpful resource in the web design industry, there probably isn’t a better place to find cutting edge design and development information focused on web standards and best practices.

Adobe Blogs

Being in the design industry, it is imperative we keep up with the latest when it comes to all things Adobe. Along with news on the Adobe front, it is also a great source for tutorials, tips, and tricks on your favorite Adobe software.

Blogcritics

Blogcritics is a great source for all sorts of topics, from TV, Music, Culture, Books, Sports, Politics, to Gaming, and Science/Technology.  Blogcritics consists of a collection of writers from all over and has an open policy on who can write for them. You or your neighbor could be their Writer of the Day.

Gizmodo

Gizmodo is your must visit blog for all your gadgetry needs. Want to find out the latest about that smart phone app that will increase your productivity 10 folds? Well Gizmodo says there’s already one that will increase it 20 folds, so how about that?

Kotaku

OK, we admit, we have a bit of the geek-side in us and we like to get our gaming fix in every now and then. Kotaku is great way to keep up-to-date on that fix when we’re not actually gaming.

Logo Design Love

Logo Design Love is a blog focused around, you guessed it, logo design. It’s a great source for getting an interesting look at or getting inspiration from logo design.

Matt Mullenweg

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, we, here at iSynergy WebDesign, love WordPress. We use it for our own blogs and for some of our clients who want to run blogs or a light-weight CMS. As such, we like to follow Matt Mullenweg, who bears the title of being the founding developer of WordPress.

Slickdeals Blog

We, here at iSynergy, are bargain hunters and we love Slickdeals for feeding us our regular dosage of deals. Slickdeals also has a blog, beyond their deal posts, and it’s often an insightful and entertaining blog in the world of financials, employment, and bargain shopping.

Smashapps

Smashapps provides the latest news and discussion on things related to blogging, web design, and generally, any internet-based tools that can help you get a leg up in the industry.

The Onion

The Onion has been around for quite some time and is still a great source for hilarious fake news. Love the parodies and the absurdity of some of the articles, especially when they hit a note where they’re saying what the real news is actually afraid to say.

Vandelay Design

Vandelay Design blog is a great resource for various tidbits on anything pertaining to design, be it inspirational imagery, interesting photography, admirable artwork, or technical web design.

Web Design Ledger

Web Design Ledger is a great resource for tips, tools, and tutorials for web design. You can often find some controversial but informative topics. Also, their posts can get technical, but it is a web design blog after all and part of web design is in the implementation.

Web Designer Wall

If for anything else, the Web Designer Wall is one of the more gorgeously designed blogs out there. It has a chaotic feel but yet elegant. Besides the visual beauty itself, though, the content within it is great for web designers, including tutorials, tips, and general ideas on web technology and design.

Website Magazine

Website Magazine is a great place for news and information on the latest and greatest on anything pertaining to the website design and success.

Yoast

At iSynergy, we do a lot of work with WordPress (this blog uses it) and Magento (an e-commerce platform). Yoast is a great place for tips, plugins, and general information for both of these things.

What are some of your favorite blogs? Let us know in the comments. 

No related posts.

To download the latest package: sociable-bitly-mod-3.5.1

See the original post here: URL Shortening and Tracking in WordPress: Sociable Plug-in

Related posts:

1. URL Shortening and Tracking in WordPress: Sociable Plug-in
2. HTML Validation for Sociable WordPress Plug-In

However, there’s a minor problem with the multibox.js script. It appears to break within Firefox when the overlay effect is placed on only 1 object on the page (which happens quite often in individual posts). It has to do with the playNextButton and playPreviousButton objects that show up in slideshow mode. When there’s only 1 object with the overlay effect, the two buttons become undefined and end up breaking the overlay script.

To fix this, we’ll have to modify the js file within the plugin. Depending on which mootools version you’re using for the plugin, go into the plugin folder and navigate to either mtv111 (for mootools 1.11) or mtv120 (for mootools 1.2) and open either the multibox.js (for mootools 1.11) or multibox-1.3.1.js(for mootools 1.2).

For multibox.js, find line 95. For multibox-1.3.1.js, find line 97. Note the following lines of code:

if(this.options.slideshow) {
	this.playPreviousButton = new Element('div').addClass('MultiBoxPlayPrevious').injectInside(this.controls).addEvent('click', this.playprevious.bind(this));
	this.playNextButton = new Element('div').addClass('MultiBoxPlayNext').injectInside(this.controls).addEvent('click', this.playnext.bind(this));
}

Essentially, the playPreviousButton and playNextButton elements aren’t created unless the slideshow option is on. This is the culprit that causes the undefined that occurs later in the script.

Now to actually fix this problem, for multibox.js, find line 115, for multibox-1.3.1.js, find line 118. The lines correspond to the following code:

this.playNextButton.setStyle('display', 'none');
this.playPreviousButton.setStyle('display', 'none');

To fix the problem, we’ll just nest the above code within an if statement that is the same as the one used to create the elements to begin with. Our final bit of code should look like this:

if(this.options.slideshow) {
	this.playNextButton.setStyle('display', 'none');
	this.playPreviousButton.setStyle('display', 'none');
}

So essentially, if it’s not in slideshow mode, we won’t create the elements and we won’t call the elements later, either. That’s it.

No related posts.

Tracking

One key feature is the ability to track the data of how many shares are made through sociable. Using Google Analytics, it’s possible to set up event tracking as a means to keep tabs on the data.

To do this, go into the sociable plug-in folder and open the social.php file in a text editor. Go to line 703 or look for the following code (for 3.4.4):

$link .= " href=\"javascript:window.location='".urlencode($url)."';\" title=\"$description\">";

or the following (For 3.5.1 and 3.5.2):

$link .= " href=\"".$url."\" title=\"$description\">";

Add the following into the anchor tag:

 onclick=\"pageTracker._trackEvent('Sociable', 'Shared Link', '".$title."');\"

The code should look like this after (for 3.4.4):

$link .= " href=\"javascript:window.location='".urlencode($url)."';\" title=\"$description\" onclick=\"pageTracker._trackEvent('Sociable', 'Shared Link', '".$title."');\">";

Or like this (for 3.5.1 or 3.5.2):

$link .= " href=\"".$url."\" title=\"$description\" onclick=\"pageTracker._trackEvent('Sociable', 'Shared Link', '".$title."');\">";

And that’s it. As long as you have Google Analytics set up on the page already, it should start tracking events for sociable links.

Note: you can find event tracking in Google Analytics under: Content > Event Tracking

URL Shortening

Another key feature is the ability to use a URL shortener other than awe.sm. The problem with awe.sm is that it’s in beta and it isn’t publicly open to everyone. You have to apply and hope to be accepted in order to use it. URL shorteners are essential to some of the sociable links, such as Twitter, which limit the amount of characters you can use in the share message. So how can we get a URL shortener to work other than using awe.sm?

Well, I’ve found and adapted a way to use a URL shortener by way of bit.ly. I’m basing this off a topic from here. Much the same as that post, it requires modifications to the sociable plug-in. Which essentially means that the con of this modification is that it won’t work if you update the sociable plug-in with another official release in the future. However, it may not be too difficult to get it working again after an update. Just a few copy and pasting here and there. Anyway, the following is how to get it done:

Go into the sociable plug-in folder and look for the sociable.php file. Open it and search for the following line of code:

$sociable_known_sites = Array(

Under that array is a list of all the social sites that sociable supports. From here, you can pick and choose any of the social sites and replace the url string with the following:

'url' => $sociablepluginpath.'bitly.php?url=PERMALINK&title=TITLE&blogname=BLOGNAME&socialsite=[SOCIAL SITE]',

Be sure to replace [SOCIAL SITE] with the name of the social site that is associated with the string.

Now, create a new file called bitly.php in the sociable plug-in folder and paste in the following:

$url = $_GET['url'];
$excerpt = $_GET['excerpt'];
$blogname = $_GET['blogname'];
$title = $_GET['title'];
$sociablesite = $_GET['socialsite'];

// Ondemand function to generate dynamic bit.ly urls
function getBitlyUrl($url) {
    // fill up this 2 lines below with your login and api key
    $bitlylogin = '[BITLY LOGIN]';
    $bitlyapikey= '[BITLY API KEY]';

    // you dont need to change below this line
    $bitlyurl = file_get_contents('http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version=2.0.1&longUrl='.$url.'&login='.$bitlylogin.'&apiKey='.$bitlyapikey);  

    $bitlycontent = json_decode($bitlyurl,true);

    $bitlyerror = $bitlycontent["errorCode"];

    if ($bitlyerror == 0){
        $bitlyurl = $bitlycontent["results"][$url]["shortUrl"];
    }
    else $bitlyurl = $url;

    return $bitlyurl;
}

Be sure to replace [BITLY LOGIN] and [BITLY API KEY] with the appropriate credentials (you can acquire them from bit.ly once you create an account).

Next, below the above code, add in the following:

if ($sociablesite == 'Twitthis') {
	header('Location: http://twitter.com/home?status='.$title.'%20-%20'.getBitlyUrl($url));
	exit;
} elseif ($sociablesite == 'Twitter') {
	header('Location: http://twitter.com/home?status='.$title.'%20-%20'.getBitlyUrl($url));
	exit;
}

Note the following code:

$sociablesite == 'Twitter'

The ‘Twitter’ and ‘Twitthis’ needs to be the same exact word/phrase as the word/phrase that was used to replace [SOCIAL SITE] within the sociable.php file.

If you want to do it for other supported sites, all you have to do is duplicate the elseif statement and replace the $sociablesite variable and the location with the matching url from the sociable.php array.

[UPDATED 02/18/2010]

You can download the completed files here:
3.5.2 – sociable-bitly-mod-3.5.2
3.5.1 – sociable-bitly-mod-3.5.1
3.4.4 – sociable-bitly-mod-3.4.4

The above set of files also includes the modifications from HTML Validation for Sociable WordPress Plug-In.

[END UPDATE]

It contains both the modified sociable.php file (including google tracking) and the completed bitly.php file. It’s also only set up for a few select sites (BarraPunto, email, Facebook, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Ping.fm, Techmeme, and Twitthis/Twitter). Some of the social sites (Digg, StumbleUpon) don’t work with bit.ly or disallow the use of shortened URLs, so it may not be advisable to set up bit.ly for them. However, the bitly.php file contains all the sites, so, you can set it up to use bit.ly if you want. All you have to do is find the site you want in sociable.php and replace the url string with the modified url string from above.

Important Note: The provided bitly.php has a placeholder for the [BITLY LOGIN] and [BITLY API KEY]. You will need to enter your own credentials for this to work.

Related posts:

1. URL Shortening – Sociable Plug-In 3.5.1
2. HTML Validation for Sociable WordPress Plug-In