Installing Share This WordPress Plugin

I spent about an hour this afternoon messing with the Share This plugin and installing it on my Business Blog. I got the plugin working just fine, but it does not come with the Facebook sharing feature installed by default.   To install the Facebook feature, I followed these directions.

Unfortunately, installing the Facebook feature did not go as quickly.   Once I copied the code from the directions above and placed it in the share-this.php file, I got an error at the line of new code.   After further investigation, there is a slight difference in this

)
, ‘facebook’ => array(
‘name’ => ‘Facebook’
, ‘url’ => ‘http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u={url}&Title={title}’

versus this:

)
, 'facebook' => array(
'name' => 'Facebook'
, 'url' => 'http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u={url}&Title={title}'


If you can’t spot the differences, look at the apostrophes.   Depending on the browsers or the text editor, the apostrophes may not work correctly or display correctly, or you may actually not be able to tell any visible difference at all.     Long story short, the version copied from the directions in the comment do not work with php, while the second version works. If you copy the above code and it still doesn’t work, delete the apostrophes in your code, and then add back in the correct apostrophes using the key next to your right pinkie.

After I got that working, I ran into another problem.   I went to http://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico to download the icon to my   local machine, then renamed the file as facebook.gif, as indicated in the instructions.   After uploading the file to my we server, everything appeared to work beautifully, until I tested the application in Internet Explorer.   For some bizarre reason, IE refused to display the facebook.gif file.

After pulling out a few of my remaining hairs, I decided to start over. I downloaded the Facebook favicon.ico again, opened it in Photoshop, then saved it as facebook.gif.   I then uploaded the new-and-improved file to the server, and magically it worked beautifully.   Something tells me that simply renaming the file wasn’t enough for IE, but the odd thing is, it displayed just fine with the Windows picture application.

After a little bit of trial-and-error, I did get the Share This plugin customized to my liking.   Now we’ll see if anyone uses it.

So why not install the plugin on this blog?   We’ll quite simply, I need a new WordPress template to run it.   Updating this blog’s template and design is on a long list of to-do’s, so I’ll eventually get around to it.   Perhaps even before WordPress 5.0 is released. 😉