I’m a big fan of Muti. The About Muti page describes it like this: “Muti is a social bookmarking site inspired by reddit and Digg but dedicated to content of interest to Africans or those interested in Africa.”
I’m also a big fan of WordPress, the blogging tool used to create this blog, and the social networking facilitated by WordPress Plugins like Gregarious. I will be sharing more about my reasons for creating this blog as this experiment unfolds. In the meantime I wanted to point out a trick I learned that is probably obvious to many but might be helpful to folks wanting to power up their blogs with Muti and other social bookmarking sites.
See the “Share this” link below? That’s the Gregarious Plugin at work. Click on the link and you will see a popup with options for bookmarking this article at various social bookmarking sites. Muti is not on this list by default - but you can add it, and you can also add the nifty Muti bookmarking icon. Here’s one way to do it.
- Install Gregarious 2.0 Beta 2 on your WordPress 2.1
- Click on Options, then the Gregarious tab
- Click on Share This Options, then Configure Social Sites
- I removed lots of these sites that I didn’t recognize and thought would be confusing to folks, and whittled it down to 5 sites.
- Then I added Muti by clicking Add some elements and then filling in the requested fields as follows:
- name: muti
- url: http://muti.co.za/submit?url={url}&title={title}
- To make the Muti icon show up along with the others..
- I went and grabbed it (right mouse click, save image as..) from this blog post: HowTo: Sociable social bookmark Wordpress plugin with Muti.co.za Button
- Then saved the file as muti.gif in the ~/wp-content/plugins/gregarious/share-this folder.
All done! Muti bookmarking is now set up gloriously on my site. Now I just need to post something relevant to Africa. 
Working very nicely! I’m glad someone uses the more ‘advanced’ features of the plugin!
Hi,
thanks fo rthe tip. I discovered Muti today readingyour article. It’s very similar to reddit.
Just one small question : How do you embed the digg button in your post?
I never suceeded to do it.
thx. Cheers.
Hey folks - thanks for the comments.
Ankur: thanks, for creating this very wonderful plugin.. given the gorgeous interfaces for it you clearly had a great time doing it.
If you plan on continuing development of the plugin, you may want to document this little-known advanced feature in the backend, so that folks know they can simply upload a gif file to have it displayed with the link. Very nifty!
jfb: I used the gregarious plugin created by Ankur, which would replace whatever plugin you used on your site to embed the digg badge and “share this” popup link on the pages. There are probably other ways to do this but I haven’t looked into them myself yet.
Cheers,
Tobias
Thanks.
Yikes - Ankur, it looks like Gregarious code gets included in comments on the Gobal Voices site:
http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2007/02/21/world-meet-africa-a-new-way-of-reporting-the-continent/#more-21186
There’s four lines of code like this in my comment:
digg_url=’http://www.saidia.org/2007/03/01/reporting-africa-blog-by-blog-becky-hogge-article-on-opendemocracy/’; digg_skin = ‘’; digg_bgcolor = ‘#FFFFFF’; digg_title = ‘Reporting+Africa%2C+blog+by+blog+-+Becky+Hogge+article+on+openDemocracy’; digg_bodytext = ‘’; digg_topic = ‘’; Powered by Gregarious (21)Share This […]
I still don’t fully understand how blogs connect like that - I didn’t go to that site and add the comment, but it somehow grabbed text from my blog and inserted it over there. Neat. But also causes some unpredictable stuff - like the text that is quoted as my comment doesn’t really make sense out of context.
-T
Very cool, we at MyTypes.com are about making a difference, so as we grow, we will find ways to help you. Thanks for the information, and if you want to do custom development work, check out our site and let us know what you think. We are beta testing a total Pligg and Wordpress installation at
http://www.myTypes.com/news