A friend of mine, Peter Harkins, is the maintainer of Sociable, a WordPress plugin that adds magical little links to social bookmarking services at the bottom of every blog post. Well, Sociable 2.0 is in a very stable beta release now, and because I’ve recently upgraded my WordPress install to 2.1, AND because I’ve absolutely never gotten around to installing the plugin… I tested it.
The install took <5 minutes. It was 100% painless.
- Download the plugin
- Unzip into WP plugins dir
- Open WP admin console -> Plugins
- Click ‘Activate’ next to Sociable in the list
- Go to Options -> Sociable
- Set desired preferences
- View your blog with cool links at the bottom of posts
Go. Get it now. You know you want to. Your blog will love you for it. 
[...] it. The install was so easy and idiot proof I’m not gonna type it up, merely link to another friend’s blog about it. If you click on one of my posts, down at the bottom you’ll see links to easily send it to [...]
I’ll have a worpress, someday. Well, technically, I have one, now, but I haven’t had the opportunity to set it up the way I want it.
I understand the function of the plugin, but not the purpose (probably because I don’t have an account at any of those sites). What’s it good for?
Sociable is good for allowing visitors to easily report your blog posts to social bookmarking services like del.icio.us or Digg.
It’s just one more way of making your content more friendly and of increasing your visibility some (since reports to these sorts of services are publicly available – other people might stumble across and follow the link).