46 Comments

• Peter Black 5th Oct '08 - 9:05pm

  It does not work. I tried logging in with my extranet user name and password but it would not let me.

• Ryan Cullen 5th Oct '08 - 9:14pm

  The extranet and Liberal Democrats Accounts are *two* different things.
  You should visit login.libdems.org.uk to create an account if you don’t already have one.

• Peter Black 5th Oct '08 - 11:22pm

  So there is not ‘one account’ to rule them all after all?

• Jonathan Calder 6th Oct '08 - 12:15am

  Like Peter, I am still using an old Blogger template. I have tried inserting the code, but it does not seem to work.

  Any suggestions?

  Many thanks

• Jennie 6th Oct '08 - 1:23am

  Yet another exclusive Lib Dem only thing that only works for some and encourages the Lib Dems who use it to look inward rather than outward? No thanks. I want the party to be LESS insular, not more.

• James Graham 6th Oct '08 - 1:25am

  With (old) blogger, take the code for the widget and replace
  [YOUR POSTS URL] with <$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$> & and
  [YOUR POSTS TITLE] with <$BlogItemTitle$>

• James Graham 6th Oct '08 - 1:26am

  Heh. Clearly and explanation is not possible via the comments. YHM.

• James Graham 6th Oct '08 - 1:32am

  Jennie – how does a social bookmarking tool which allows people to link to ANY website count as inward looking?

• Jennie 6th Oct '08 - 1:34am

  Because only Lib Dems will be using it, and looking at what other people have bookmarked. Only (some) Lib Dems will be able to put the buttons on their blog posts. There will be nobody from outside the party even getting a look in. Apart from Iain Dale, anyway.

• James Graham 6th Oct '08 - 1:44am

  Except that a) they will have a look-in (you don’t need to login to read it), b) most – not “some” – people will be able to add the button (and everyone will be able to add the bookmarklet) and c) it isn’t intended to be the only news source for anyone and won’t be. Sure, it is a community resource, but by its very definition it is an outward looking one.

• Jennie 6th Oct '08 - 1:51am

  Lib Dem Blogs wasn’t meant to be the feedreader of choice for Lib Dem bloggers either, but I reckon more than half of the people looking at this use it as such.

  How many people are going to read something they can’t contribute to? Isn’t that why we insist that Nadine Dorries’s propaganda tool isn’t a blog?

  I can’t add the button. There are two comments from people above who can’t add the button. And who can be arsed editing a bookmarklet into every post?

  This is exclusionary, and anti-new-people, and I don’t see how you can claim it’s outward-looking in all seriousness.

  But, whatever, I can see I’m not going to change your mind, so…

  * shrug *

  … enjoy your new toy

• James Graham 6th Oct '08 - 2:10am

  The two people above can add the widget, as I have just emailed them and can demonstrate here. It is a line of code. Clearly it should be a priority to make it as simple as possible for people to use, but I seriously doubt that it will be significantly more complicated for 99% of platforms.

  I accept it probably isn’t that simple with Live Journal because nothing is ever that simple with LJ. But then who’s fault is that? Couldn’t it be something to do with introversion on the part of the LJ community (it isn’t just me saying that – didn’t you just link favourably to this)?

  No doubt LibDig can be improved and will be over time. But the idea that it is a step towards insularity is absurd; if anything it is a reaction against the insularity of LibDemBlogs.

• Mark Valladares 6th Oct '08 - 8:49am

  I always welcome new features, as they provide an opportunity of one kind or another.

  I’ve registered for LibDig but guess I’m less likely to use it. The thought of adding code to any entry I write, especially if I’m using my BlackBerry to blog, does not fill me with the deepest of joy. Besides, the idea of deciding which pieces I ‘nominate’ strikes me as (even more) vanity publishing.

  However, there are those who will use it and benefit from doing so. Once again, we should be grateful to Ryan for creating the tool on our behalf.

• Peter Black 6th Oct '08 - 9:25am

  I am sorry but could somebody please post what this is all about in words of one syllable. I have tried to install it on my blog but despite a very helpful e-mail from James Graham am unable to do so. I then tried to submit and entry to see what happens but that confused me even more. It is not just a matter of voting but of submitting comments as well. You cannot vote without submitting a comment. To confuse me more when I looked at a Paul Walter post on Libdig and then went to his blog he does not have the widget or anyway of voting for his post. So how did it appear on Libdig? Oh and what is the point anyway?

  signed A. Luddite.

• Joe Otten 6th Oct '08 - 10:47am

  I fully support this. Excellent. I did have one or two problems with the instructions for installing into blogger, that some unescaped characters had to be escaped and vice versa.

  I would post what I did here, but html escaping would defeat me. Happy to email it to anyone.

• Ryan Cullen 6th Oct '08 - 10:47am

  You don’t need the widget to appear on your blog, it just makes it easier for people to vote for you.
  Submittions can be made direct from LibDemBlogs (when it’s back up) and if a post has already been submitted you can click through to it’s LibDig page and then click on the Dig It button on the left.

  Jennie, the bookmarklet isn’t to be used within the post. It’s to be used with your browsers whilst surfing the net. If you right click on the bookmarklet text and “Add to bookmarks” / “Add to favourites”, when you open the bookmark it will take you to LibDig prefilling the URL and Title of the page you were just on.
  Also it’s not my fault if LJ won’t allow Javascript or iFrames, however it should be possible to place the following link at the bottom of every post (or in a template)
  <a href="http://libdig.co.uk/add.php?ref=1">LibDig This</a>

  Peter, there is no need to comment on anything if you don’t want. I’m guessing that you didn’t see the “Dig It” on the left, which I can understand if you haven’t used Digg-esque sites.

• Joe Otten 6th Oct '08 - 10:56am

  Ryan, on commenting, if I click the LibDig bookmarklet on a page not previously submitted, I get a popup. If I then press submit without commenting I get the message:

  Story description must be at least 10 characters long

  This must be what Peter was talking about.

  Anyway, I’m off to dig everything Jennie writes, just to annoy her.

• Will Howells 6th Oct '08 - 11:00am

  You can submit any web page anywhere on the web to LibDig. The widget is a way of showing if a post has been Dug and encouraging people to Dig it, but isn’t necessary for Digging.

  If a page has already been Dug and you are logged in to LibDig, you don’t need to do anything beyond click to Dig it, either on the widget if it’s there, or on LibDig itself.

• Jennie 6th Oct '08 - 11:04am

  Joe: 😛

  Guys: I don’t think Peter has ever used Digg, so telling him that it works like Digg isn’t going to help. He wants to know what the point is?

  Having tried and discarded as pointless timewasters both Digg and Delicious on more than one occasion, I guess I’m not the best person to explain it…

• James Shaddock 6th Oct '08 - 11:23am

  Would the launch of LibDig be connected to LibDem Blogs not working or is it just me its not working for?

• Jennie 6th Oct '08 - 11:25am

  Nah, it’s all of us, James. Ryan is on it, at least by his comment above.

• Peter Black 6th Oct '08 - 11:53am

  Am I correct that you have to be a party member to vote?

  By the way I have added Digg to my coding but the widget sits in a funny way and unless I can correct it then it is coming off. It is on my blog now if you wish to see for yourself. Any ideas? Thanks

• Ryan Cullen 6th Oct '08 - 12:30pm

  Peter you have this in your template straight after the LibDig code:
  <div style="clear:both;"></div>
  You will either need to replace that code, or move the LibDig bit after it.

• Peter Black 6th Oct '08 - 12:35pm

  Thanks Ryan. It was showing up in the source code but not the actual template html. James has now sorted it for me. Apparently, I needed to amend the settings.

  OK, I am on board. Can you now tell me what libdig is for?

• Ryan Cullen 6th Oct '08 - 12:50pm

  The idea of LibDig is to highlight the best bits of the web in one place.
  There are many other sites which do the same, however depending on the membership depends on what appears. For example the biggest site Digg.com have “Is Google Using Chrome to Index Password Protected Web?”, “24 Words The Dictionary Wants To Ditch” and “How green is your computer?” which are probablly articles that you wouldn’t want to read.
  By only allowing LibDems to nominate and vote it “should” pickup stories which intrest the LibDem community.

• James Graham 6th Oct '08 - 12:52pm

  Its purpose is to recommend to other people good and interesting items on the internet, and to see their recommendations:

  1. You can use the newsfeed to read recommended links more or less as they are recommended.
  2. The website itself shows you what is getting the most recommendations and hence what is most highly recommended.

  It means that the best blog posts, videos, etc. will get greater exposure than they do at present. The more people who use it, the more comprehensive it will become and unlike LibDemBlogs, more participants will result in better recommendations instead of simply more noise.

• Jennie 6th Oct '08 - 1:04pm

  “the best blog posts, videos, etc.”

  I’d argue that “most popular” does not equal best, myself, but perhaps I should stop stirring…

• Peter Black 6th Oct '08 - 1:20pm

  ‘Peter, there is no need to comment on anything if you don’t want. I’m guessing that you didn’t see the “Dig It” on the left, which I can understand if you haven’t used Digg-esque sites.’

  Ryan could you please elaborate on this please? On the left of what?

• James Shaddock 6th Oct '08 - 1:38pm

  Does anyone know how to get the image widget to work on WordPress? I’ve tried making the alterations as per the Lib Dig site, but nothing happens.

• Will Howells 6th Oct '08 - 1:51pm

  James, the code wasn’t quite right earlier on so depending when you copied it, I’d try the revised code now. It’s working OK on my WordPress site.

• James Shaddock 6th Oct '08 - 2:13pm

  Nope, still nothing.

  Here is what I’m doing.

  1. Copy the full code from LibDig and paste it into the ‘post’ box
  2. Copy the alterations for WordPress.org and make the switch
  3. Click preview…nothing

• Ryan Cullen 6th Oct '08 - 3:33pm

  James, you have WordPress.com, which is different (if not annoyingly named) from WordPress.org.
  If anyone works out if it is possible I’ll put the code onto the widgets page.

• James Shaddock 6th Oct '08 - 3:43pm

  I see now. Alas, my knowledge of code and other forms of web geekery are limited to say the least and I didn’t recognise the difference.

• Andrew 6th Oct '08 - 5:54pm

  When I first saw this I thought “Yawn – another way for us all to pat ourselves on the back”

  But now having had a look and a wee think I see it has the potential to be an excellent idea, but only if people use it to flag up posts, news, events, etc outside LibDemBlogs that others aren’t necessarily going to read.

  For me, there is little point flagging up an LDV or other LDB post because most people are going to be reading those anyway. Instead I will probably use it to flag up the things I read everyday (mostly science and economics) that most others wouldn’t, but that they might be interested in (my first one is here).

  If people treat it like that rather than a brown-tongued extravaganza then it will be a great development.

• Joe Otten 7th Oct '08 - 12:42am

  Andrew, I’m guessing that the events/news/videos sections are for you, not so much the ‘blog posts’.

  FWIW, I think it is fair enough to dig stuff on libdem blogs. Not everybody reads it all: I rarely do, and I often skim past good pieces when I do.

  So, wishlist:
  1. A way to click through from the list of dug items direct to the items.
  2. Feeds for the dug items. (Below shared links on my blog I could put a widget of lib dem dug links).
  3. tags – to make the resource browsable as well as topical. Whether you can read author’s tags, or allow diggers to tag, I don’t know.

• Ryan Cullen 7th Oct '08 - 9:30am

  Joe
  1. If you click on the number of votes it should directly link to the story, although I plan to tweek the template soon.
  2. There is an RSS feed, which if you view the source (or use Firefox) you should find.
  I hope to make the url a bit more friendly via the .htaccess file.
  3. The software had “tags” built in, however it turned out to be rather rubbish. For the time being it’s not a priority.

• Joe Otten 7th Oct '08 - 10:47am

  Cool. I’ve added the feed to my blog in a widget. Although the feed URL says cmd=popular, it seems to more closely resemble the upcoming items. cmd=upcoming gives a slightly different list also resembling the upcoming items.

  I would rather have the current popular items. I am assuming there is some logic whereby an item with lots of old votes will eventually drop off the list in favour of newer items even if they don’t get so many votes.

  Wishlist 4, not sure if it actually a good idea, might be to allow people to submit feeds of their own shared links, or, say, facebook posted items, to libdig as an “I dig everything on here”. Descriptions might be an issue, I suppose.

  But leveraging the social bookmarking people are already using might be easier than getting them to use another one.

• Alix Mortimer 8th Oct '08 - 11:04am

  “If you right click on the bookmarklet text and “Add to bookmarks” / “Add to favourites”, when you open the bookmark it will take you to LibDig prefilling the URL and Title of the page you were just on.”

  This isn’t working for me. The prefilled URL is always the LibDig widgets page, no matter what page my browser was resting on when I clicked the bookmark. What am I doing wrong?

• James Graham 8th Oct '08 - 11:24am

  I don’t know about anyone else but I simply click and dragged that button into my toolbar.

• Alix Mortimer 8th Oct '08 - 11:28am

  Aha, that’s better, thank you!

• Tony Walley 8th Oct '08 - 5:01pm

  We are a blog set up to give the people of Stoke on Trent their say. Our blog is attracting large number of posts. It’s sad but a fact that the BNP are popular in Stoke. Our city has no middle ground to turn to when we are disillusioned with Labour or the Tories. Our blog is has attracted the BNP activists and we need opposing views please pass this on to all willing debaters! I will put a link to your site on our blog, please do the same for us. If you know the contact details of the local Libdems in Stoke, please mail me.
  Our blog address http://pitsnpots.blogspot.com
  Regards,
  Tony

• Tony Walley 8th Oct '08 - 5:02pm

  We are a blog set up to give the people of Stoke on Trent their say. Our blog is attracting large number of posts. It’s sad but a fact that the BNP are popular in Stoke. Our city has no middle ground to turn to when we are disillusioned with Labour or the Tories. Our blog is has attracted the BNP activists and we need opposing views please pass this on to all willing debaters! I will put a link to your site on our blog, please do the same for us. If you know the contact details of the local Libdems in Stoke, please mail me.
  Regards,
  Tony

• Ryan Cullen 8th Oct '08 - 9:02pm

  I’ve made a few minor hyperlink tweaks to the pages. You can now get direct access to the recommended page by clicking on the bit which says via example.co.uk

  I have also fixed the bug which meant the number of votes didn’t change on the left when you voted (votes were still counted and an F5 would have shown the increased count).

  I’m still not 100% sure about the “popular” logic, I’m going to wait for a week to see what happens with the posts and how far they fall (if at all) before looking at recoding it.

  For the time being I’m keeping away from any auto feeds as I want people to submit items they want to recommend to other LibDems.

• Matt Wardman 9th Oct '08 - 11:14am

  Catching up 🙂

  Looks interesting – is this the first independent site to be integrated with the Party login accounts system?

  I admit that I have the same concern above about “silos”, and discouraging cross-party blog-reading.

  But I can’t see how it would work without submission being a walled garden – 6 BNP activists could bury it in noise if it was a completely open system. And then you’d be into all mechanisms that Digg have to cope with abuse, and that *would* be a waste of time.

  Matt

• Martin Tod 11th Oct '08 - 11:33am

  The LibDig plug-in is now available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/libdig/.

• Martin Tod 11th Oct '08 - 4:09pm

  Matt. I think Flock Together was the first. There’s also Liberty Research. Although arguably they’re ‘arms length’ rather than fully independent.