It’s been a while since the whole HD DVD key disaster, but this was the first I saw a nice blog post about it at Digerati.

If you missed out, someone got the decryption key for HD DVDs, put it online, and that article made it onto Digg’s front page. Once that happened, Digg got a call ordering them to take it down… and they did. But it was too late. Everyone had the key and kept digging stories that had the key until Digg shut down their submit page!

The funny part is what stories were making it onto the front page. One was “Can You Find the Hidden Message in This Optical Illusion?” with the hidden message being the HD-DVD key!

Some people were quite creative, and at least a couple were captured in the screenshot at the Digerati post.

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I hope so. Have you tried the digg button creator I posted about the other day?

I tried it out, and, as suspected, I can’t easily add it to a blog post. The code just gets stripped out. I figure I can easily add it to any of my static web pages, though.

So I can’t complain too much, but I had to mention this just because I put the digg button post in the “good” category, as opposed to the “this sucks” category where most stuff goes. I don’t want anyone thinking I’ve gone soft!

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So you have a little link on your blog entries to submit the article to Digg - but how can you make it easier for people to digg your article once it is already on Digg?

I have found the answer!

All the credit for this goes to Alex Bosworth as far as I know. I actually found his article through Digg, so there’s proof that this works! Basically you are allowing people to Digg your article without leaving your website. Very cool.

Read the whole story and see an example at Alex’s blog. After reading, be sure to check out the Digg button creator and make your own buttons for your stories!

Be on the lookout for this in my future blog entries!

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After seeing the numerous bloggers who had integrated “Digg this” and other links directly into their blog posts, I became a bit jealous and pissed off, as you could expect. I need all the help I can get, so I set off in a search for how to put these infamous little icons on my blog…

And luckily I found a site telling me how. It gave me the code and everything. Turns out you just put some code in your single.php or comments.php file and then it does everything automatically after that!

The post is from a while ago at exploding-boy.

So I opened up my files and pasted the code in there. And guess what - it didn’t work! So I tweaked the code a bit to no avail…

Luckily though, some other bloggers were there to save the day - people had posted comments like “thanks for the tip, I’ve used it on my blog.” Great! I can check out how they did it and I’ll be all set!

To my surprise, these bloggers tricked me - none of them actually had the code on their blogs! At least not on the ones they linked to, so it did me no good. So much for the friendly blogosphere!

I had had it, and decided to draw on my very own php coding skills to figure it out. (By the way, I have no php coding skills…)

But luckily I do have some mental reasoning ability and figured out how to tweak my links so they work! Well, it looks like they work…

Want to know how I did it?

1. I used the proper html linking tags, with proper quotation placement. (The very basics.)
2. I changed the & to its html equivalent in the links themselves. (More basic html.)
3. I added a question mark to any > in the php code that didn’t already have one. (This was the key step.)

I think that was it.

Oh yes, one last tip: Add this code near the bottom of your theme’s single.php file or the top of your comments.php file, depending which file is present in your theme. (Sorry if you aren’t using Wordpress!)

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