Railing against Digg and it’s kind is great sport but don’t get me wrong - I recognize the importance of those services in the context of a site such as this. Digg offers the promise of broad exposure and exposure means readership. Getting readership has taken us a few months, but we’re just now starting to regularly receive thoughtful comments from all over the place and that’s incredibly gratifying.

So to increase exposure NBEHTM and I decided to see to updating the site with a “Post to Digg” type feature such as we’ve seen elsewhere. Writing code from scratch can be fun but it’s generally time consuming. And this leads me to why I love open source. If you’ve ever wished you had a service or feature on your site, somebody else has probably already done something that’s at least similar and shared the code. Our “Post to Digg” feature was no exception.

In fact, the trouble for us wasn’t in finding code that somebody else had already written - it was in deciding between the wealth of options that were available. You’ll notice that there is a link at the bottom of each post now, a very subtle one. This is Share This, written by Alex King. We chose this Wordpress plugin because it is a very tastefully done option but there are certainly others.

Open source is the foundation for progress. While this site isn’t curing cancer or anything so noble as that, open source enabled us to avoid wasting time reimplementing features that had been produced elsewhere. Open source is doing this on a daily basis - providing solutions to common problems for people around the world. Effort can be focused in areas such as content creation or truly new feature development as a result of the benefits of open source.

So thanks to Alex King, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Guido Van Rossum and all the millions of others who are powering the Internet and making something truly remarkable available to the masses.

Update

Ankur of Digg This Reloaded, referred to above, points out that DTR now includes Share This.