While going through some of the recent news, I noticed that Google had officially released their Plus One capabilities. Plus One seems to be getting a lot of press as being “competition” with Facebook. As far as I can tell, the idea is that since I can hit the Plus One button on a site or a search result and then my friends will see it as more relevant in search results, that competes with sharing a link in Facebook. I don’t share links on Facebook that often though so maybe I just don’t see it yet. At any rate, I felt that I should immediately comply with Google’s implied wishes and add Plus One to my site and the Veritas source code (now on GIT, more about that later). Now, whenever you view an entry on the site, you can see the Plus One button near the bottom of the entry. Feel free to click it as much as possible so that other people will know as well! As far as implementation goes, it is VERY SIMPLE. You can view instructions on implementing it at the Google Webmaster site. You need to put two tags in your html. In the head, or just before the body close, you need to put the javascript include:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
From there, all you have to do is insert the following where you want the “Plus One” button to appear:
<g:plusone></g:plusone>
There are a few parameters you can read about for use with the plusone tag. Since I wanted to show the Plus One on pages where I’m showing multiple entries, I need to specify what URL I’m referring to for each instance of the Plus One. This is done easily enough by adding a HREF attribute to the plus one tag. So now the tag from above becomes something like this:
<g:plusone href="http://chrisrisner.com/myUniqueUrl"></g:plusone>
That’s about all there is to it. Plus One Away!
