StudioPress recently released the Simple Social Icons WordPress plugin. Coded by Nathan Rice, this plugin/widget enables users to easily display social media/networking icons on any widget area of the blog and link it to different social profiles.

Like its name, the Simple Social Icons plugin is very simple and easy to use that it doesn’t even need a settings page. It is also very customizable – users can customize the color and size of the icons and choose to align the icons left or right.

Screenshot:
Widget Admin Screen

Installation:

1. Upload the entire simple-social-icons folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. In your Widgets menu, simply drag the widget labeled “Simple Social Icons” into a widgetized Area.
4. Configure the widget by choosing a title, icon size and color, and the URLs to your various social profiles.

Social icons included in the plugin:

• Dribbble
• Email
• Facebook
• Google +
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• RSS
• StumbleUpon
• Twitter

I think it would be great if more social icons could be added to it like Reddit, Flickr, YouTube, FriendFeed, Instagram, Path, etc. One more thing, at this time the plugin doesn’t allow users to re-order the icons so it would be nice to have the option/functionality in the next update. But other than those two things, there’s nothing really much to say or complain about this WordPress plugin because it is easy to use and does what its supposed to do.

Thanks to Nathan Rice and the good folks over at StudioPress for creating and releasing this cool and very useful plugin to the WordPress community.

NOTE: The Simple Social Icons plugin requires WordPress 3.3 or higher.

Download the Simple Social Icons plugin from the official WordPress plugin repository

How do you like the Simple Social Icons plugin/widget? Anyone tried or already use this plugin on their blog? Please share your thoughts.

Here’s a preview of the icons included in the Social Media Icon Set:

Each icon in the WPZOOM Social Media icon set is available in two different sizes: 26×26 pixels and 38×38 pixels and two different file formats: PNG and PSD source files. The icons in this set were designed by Umar Irshad, a web designer from Pakistan.

The WPZOOM Social Media Icon Set is FREE to download and can be used anywhere you want. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you decide to use or share this icon set, the author will appreciate if you link back to this article or to the author’s website.

Kudos to WPZOOM for sharing another free beautiful icon set and also to Umar for doing a great job with the icons.

Download the WPZOOM Social Media Icon Set

This infographic breaks down the top social media or social networking sites according to gender, age, income and other demographics. The sites involved in this infographic are: Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, StumbleUpon, YouTube and Digg.

Key Points:

• MySpace has the greatest gender divide, with a 64% female and 36% male membership.
• Twitter has the largest division of wealthy users with 27% earning $75,000/year or more.
• Facebook has the largest division of older users with 37% being 45 years or older.
• Digg has the largest division of users with a graduate degree at 9%.
• Stumbleupon is very popular among graphic designers. You’re 14.2 times more likely to reach a graphic designer through Stumbleupon than if you were to cast your marketing message broadly across the internet.

This infographic doesn’t only provide interesting data to regular users but it also helps bloggers, webmasters, advertising and marketing people to determine what or where they should be focusing their marketing efforts on.

What do you think of KISSmetric’s Who Likes What Social Media infographic? What particular statistic or data do you find most interesting? Please share your thoughts.

If you’ve noticed in this new theme, I also have a custom greet box but I didn’t make it myself, its powered by a WordPress plugin called WP Greet Box, created by Thaya Kareeson of OmniNoggin.

With this plugin, I can have a custom greet box any time and in any theme I use. What makes the WP Greet Box even better than a custom built greet box is that it displays different customized greet boxes to your readers/visitors depending on their referrer URL.

This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to digg your post if they like it. Another example, when a visitor clicks through from Twitter, they will see a message suggesting them to twit the post and follow you on Twitter. You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Features:

• Show a different greeting message to your visitor depending on the referrer URL. You can add/edit/delete/disable these greeting messages as you choose.
• Greeting messages automatically get inserted into the top of your posts upon activation. There is no need to modify theme files.
• Ability to auto-insert greeting message to the top or bottom of the post.
• Greeting messages can be user closeable or not.
• Ability to detect the visitor’s search keywords from major search engines and automatically display related posts under the greeting message.
• Show a default greeting message even if the vistor does not match any of your configured referrer URL.
• Show a default greeting message even if the visitor does not have javascript enabled.
• AJAX greeting message in the frontend makes it compatible with caching plugins (such as WP Super Cache) and WPMU.
• AJAX administrative interface that uses nonce verification to discourage hackers.
• Ability to set a timeout to forget a visitor so we do not keep nagging them with greeting messages.
• Ablity to set rules to exclude some referrer URLs from seeing greeting messages. Regular expressions is also supported (but not required!).
• Ultra customizeable greeting message box (with CSS) allowing you to prepend/append HTML around the greeting message box.

Other Greet Boxes:

WP Greet Box not only helps you promote your RSS feed and increase your RSS feed readers but having these targeted suggestions on your blog increases your blog exposure and loyal readership. Aside from promoting your RSS feed, encouraging social network bookmarking and article submission, WP Greet Box also displays related posts to the current post which leads to more pageviews and helps reduce bounce rate. From the WP Greet Box settings, you can specify how many related posts to display and how many words the post excerpt displays.

WP Greet Box is very easy to install, it doesn’t require any special configuration. Just upload it to your wp-content/plugins folder, install and activate. In case you prefer a different greeting message than the preset ones, you can go to Settings > WP Greet Box and change it. There’s one thing I noticed though, sometimes the greet box takes a while to load that the whole page has already finished loading and it would take 2-3 seconds before the greet box to show up. I hope the plugin author takes a look at this and makes some changes.

What are you waiting for, give WP Greet Box a try and increase your blog’s RSS subscribers, pageviews and exposure.

Have you tried or are currently using WP Greet Box? What has been your experience with it so far? What do you like/dislike about it? Has it helped you increase your blog’s RSS subscribers, visitor loyalty or pageviews? What other features would you like to see added to WP Greet Box?

[via Weblog Tools Collection]

Pinoy Blogosphere

• Do you really need to learn programming to be successful online? No, but learning to code in PHP can help you a lot. McBilly explains why on his latest post.
• Just learned from Dexter of TechAtHand that some blogspot blogs are being marked as potential spam blogs even if they’re not. One example is the blog Jehzlau Concepts by Jehzeel Laurente.
• Adsense recently required all Adsense publishers to have a site-wide privacy policy page in their blogs. Whether you’ve already created one or not, the question is, do you understand why you have or need a privacy policy?
• Need more traffic for your blog? Jam talks about her experience on getting more traffic from StumbleUpon and shares 4 ways on how to get that traffic to your blog.
• Win a Premium FruitfulTime License from J Angelo Racoma’s first blog contest. It’s so easy to join, just answer the question he posted and leave your answer via a comment.

Around the Web

• Don’t want Google or other search engines to index your images? Hack WordPress has this short but effective tutorial on preventing search engines from indexing your images. This method is advisable for blogs or websites that use a lot of custom images and don’t want it to be spread across the world wide web for others to get or use.
• Wanna build a Quad Core desktop but have a tight budget? Jon Lee’s latest article will show you how you can build a Quad Core desktop for $500. You can really save a lot if you buy the parts and assemble it yourself. If you can’t do that, you can ask a friend or someone you know and still save money.
• Do you spend a lot of time watching television? If so, you are wasting a lot of your valuable time. Why not blog instead? Katy points out four reasons why blogging is better than television programming.
• Andy MacDonald writes over at BloggingTips on how to become successful in blogging by making an impression. Good read if you want to learn more on how to improve your writing/blogging skills.

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or want your article to be featured in the next Weekend Roundup, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message via the contact page.