AddThis 16×16 Badges For Download

I’m working on social bookmarking integration on a project. By far, the easiest way to do this is to use the AddThis service. It gives all the tracking and metrics information if you want it and it takes of the little differences between how each service bookmarks and homogenizes it down to a simple link that redirects you to the service. Basically, AddThis works as a middle man between a lot of the social bookmarking sites out there. As of this post, AddThis has 54 services that it supports. It also has a good API that allows an AddThis badge to be added quite easily to a HTML page.

Adding it to a Flash RIA is a different story, there is no official support, but there are a few ideas floating around. I wanted to use the AddThis badges that display in the pop up inside my application. I couldn’t find any place where they were publicly available. Also, I couldn’t just web grab them from the page, because they are set as backgrounds in the CSS, not images. I looked around in the source and was able to find the stylesheet. The stylesheet is not written reader friendly, but I was able to find the sprite they use for all the badges.

The direct link to the social bookmark badge on addthis.com is here. For what it’s worth, I cut up the sprite in Photoshop and saved each badge out as a PNG file. A ZIP file of all the badges is here. Each filename corresponds to the services code used by AddThis in the redirect query string discussed in their API. I think this has probably been a wasted day for me, because I am probably going to make some slicker badges and a nicer interface inside my RIA. Hopefully, someone will benefit from this, but I am probably going to go another direction.