Several weeks ago I discovered a great little plugin for WordPress called Fixed Social Buttons.

This plugin automatically places buttons for popular Social Networking and Bookmarking sites at the side of your blog page, it’s very easy to set up, and the buttons stand out much better for sharing than others I have found in the body of a post.

To install the plugin on your WordPress site, go to Plugins in the Admin Panel and select Add New.  Then search for “Fixed Social Buttons.   The nice thing about the latest versions of WordPress I think everyone will agree is that plugins these days can be installed and updated at the touch of a button, and this is no exception.  It’s a lot better than having to download, unzip and FTP up to the correct folder on the server.  But I digress…

Having installed Fixed Social Buttons, a new option should appear in the Admin Panel under Settings.

The Settings couldn’t be easier to understand.  You can choose the style and size of the buttons to use, which buttons to show – currently 11 (Flickr, Delicious, Digg, Webonews, Linkedin, Myspace, Reddit, Technorati, Facebook, Twitter, and lastly subscribe to RSS feed ), whether they should appear at the Top or Bottom of the page, and whether they should be shown as Vertical or Horizontal.

You can also specify whether the links are to open in a new window or not, whether to make the links Follow or No Follow, and if you are sharing to Flickr or Twitter, add your profile details.

It’s as simple as that – simple and effective.  I hope you find this useful.
See also the Fixed Social Buttons plugin page.