Turning on the social networking using wordpress, muti and gregarious

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.

1. Install Gregarious 2.0 Beta 2 on your WordPress 2.1
2. Click on Options, then the Gregarious tab
3. Click on Share This Options, then Configure Social Sites
4. 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.
5. Then I added Muti by clicking Add some elements and then filling in the requested fields as follows:
   1. name: muti
   2. url: http://muti.co.za/submit?url={url}&title={title}
6. To make the Muti icon show up along with the others..
   1. 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
   2. 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.