The Marketing Technology Blog

Josh Colter (a new co-worker) emailed me the other day and asked if I had an “Email this” capability on my blog to email a specific blog entry to a friend of his.

This is not an inherent capability in WordPress, but I thought I remembered seeing it in FeedBurner. Sure enough, the smart folks over at FeedBurner added the capability to their application so that you can add this functionality to your website.

As with most of FeedBurner, my only complaint is actually finding the functionality. You’ll find it in the Optimize section under FeedFlare:

You’ll notice that there are 2 selections… one for your feed and one for your website. To add the selected links to your website, you’ll need to grab the appropriate code from the bottom of the page. Select WordPress in the list and you’ll get the code you need. I added the code to my Single Post page under the content.

Here’s an additional tip for you… you can actually modify your style sheet and decorate the links as well. You’ll notice that I’ve added a little email image (from FamFamFam) to my FeedFlare using the following style:

.feedburnerFlareBlock {
background:url(’images/email_go.png’) left center no-repeat;
display:block;
padding:2px 0 2px 20px;
}

To see it in action, take a look at this post in its own page. You’ll see the Email This link under the content.

What’s also nice about this functionality is that FeedFlare has dozens of other flare that you can add in their repertoire. No need to recode your site… just change it on the fly in FeedBurner!