Social media optimization is a big right now. There are a lot of sites that want to be featured on Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook or one of the many other social networks. However, getting there isn’t always that easy. The first steps though is ensuring you have social media links on your blog to make sharing that content easy. My favorite tool of the moment for this is ShareThis.

ShareThis use to be a plugin for Wordpres that injected social media icons, and an email this, link into your posts. It worked very well but was Wordpress only until recently. It’s since been re-launched as a service that’ll work across any blogging platform or website.

Signing up for a ShareThis account is really easy. They just ask for your email address and a password. This information is then used to track the ShareThis button performance on your site. It’ll keep track of who’s clicking which options, your most popular content and other visitor information. However, the reports are not yet available for the public but should be by the end of the year.

Safari 3, now for Mac and PC, recently came out in beta form. Included in this release was the ability for users to use visual editors also know as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors. No longer do Safari users have to know code to make basic formatting in blog posts.

Safari 3.0.1 Beta on Windows XP

I’ve tested it in Wordpress 2.2 and it works great.* As far as I understand, previous versions of Wordpress don’t support Safari’s rich text editing. Testing it out under 2.0.10 confirms this.

I also tested out Blogger and had no issues. They seem to be on board with the Safari 3 crowd too.

TypePad however didn’t seem to support rich text editing with Safari yet.

With Safari 3 being so new, and brand new to the Windows world, blog software creators are working in Safari support as they feel the need.

If you use TypePad, or other software that doesn’t support Safari’s rich text editing yet, drop and email to their support so they know your interested.

BloggerDesign just took the plunge and upgraded to Wordperss 2.2 (from 2.1.3). It was simple and easy, just as it should be. Going from 2.1.x to 2.2 isn’t as big of a deal as going from 2.0.x to 2.1 (or 2.2) is.

The biggest update I saw was the hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari. This will make a lot of Safari users happy. Of course, it’s in an up-coming version of the browser. My guess is that Safari in Mac OSX 10.5 (aka Leopard) will be a nice upgrade. Can’t wait!!

Wordpress 2.2 also claims it’ll protect the user from activating a plugin or making edits that will break the blog. So far, I’ve activated a plugin that broke the plugins page so it didn’t protect me from that. I’m not sure what I’m being protected from yet.

One GREAT feature is that they brought back the ‘Preview’ post link when writing. And this time, it links out to the actual blog and not just down the page to a preview in an iFrame. I’m really happy to see this feature return as I missed it quite a bit.