If you are a blogger, you probably are already using a plugin that allows your visitors to share your posts with their friends using the social bookmarking and networking websites. For most of my WordPress blogs, I have some sort of social bookmarking plugin installed. Until the other day, I never gave the plugin much thought.
The other day when thinking of ways to increase traffic to one of my blogs. I made a post on Self Starters internet marketing forum about which plugin I should use. I figured that having the plugin could only improve my stats if anything else. I got a couple responses on the forum that recommended using Sociable. I then looked at their blogs and seen big social bookmarking icons. For some reason, I never even looked to see if I had already installed the plugin. I downloaded the Sociable plugin and when I went to install it, realized I had an older version of the plugin. So I upgraded. I then went to my blog and seen the little icons, see below:
Okay, this was not the icons that I seen on the other two blogs. When I installed the plugin there was an option to put a link to your own images. I knew this was the answer so I downloaded some bigger icons and changed the path. I refreshed by blog and they were still small. I right clicked one of the images and seen that they images were being scaled. So I knew I was not crazy. I then had to look for the answer which I found.
To make your icons a certain size, you have to edit the Sociable.css file. If you open the .css file, you will be able to change the height and width of your icons. Example below:
.sociable img {
float: none;
width: 48px;
height: 48px;
border: 0;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}Once I uploaded the updated version of the .css file, I reloaded my blog. I was so excited to see BIG icons. See below:
I LOVE the big buttons. Now I plan on adding this plugin to this blog and a few others. I see so many people using small buttons and think that maybe they just don’t know how to make them bigger. If you want big icons, you can download a set of icons at iconspedia. You can download the Social Me icon pack that includes 30 icons in sizes of 32px, 48px and 64px. I choose to use the 48px icons above.
Until Next Time
Stefani
Thank you Stefani. Great useful post!
Thanks for the post! You totally solved my problem.
Changing the css doesn’t work for my site. I edited the sociable css from wordpress itself.
I think I’ll try the big icons @ iconspedia.
Thanks so much for this post! I was getting frustrated because so many blogs seem to be running big icons with Sociable, yet the plugin’s default are so small and unpleasant (unless you buy Sociable Pro…)
Can’t wait to see how the bigger icons are going to look on my sites!