Scuttle’s social bookmarking sites are a great way to save your bookmarks and give your websites great backlinks.
Scuttle is free, open source social bookmarking software developed in PHP and MySQL and is available for download at sourceforge.net, simply search for sourceforge + scuttle in your favorite search engine.
I’ve put together this basic step-by-step guide to quickly set up your new Scuttle social bookmarking site. It is assumed that you are already familiar with buying domain names and setting up hosting and MySQL databases. If you don’t have this experience, you can find the information in various places on the web.
- You need a domain to host the site, here are three options, preferably one with a name that suits the purpose, although almost any name can be adapted:
- The quickest thing to do is to use a suitably named domain that you already own and is sitting idle or parked waiting for that big new project, unfortunately not everyone is that lucky.
- The next fastest thing is to go to GoDaddy or a similar registrar and purchase a suitable domain.
- The third and slowest method is to purchase a delete name with an existing page rank from GoDaddy or similar auction sites. This may be the slowest method, but it gives you an advantage in terms of backlink building and page rank.
- Next, you need hosting, if you don’t have hosting yet, try my favorites: Dreamhost or Bluehost.
- You will now need to configure a database for Scuttle to use, note the name of the database, and log in with the credentials.
- Go to sourceforge and download the latest version of Scuttle to your hard drive.
- Unzip all files.
- Use the tables.sql file to set up the Scuttle tables in your new database.
- Edit the config.inc.php file with the details of your new database. There are other options that can be configured, but for now this is all you need to do.
- Now, using an FTP utility like FileZilla, upload all the files and folders you unzipped to the root directory of your domain.
- Set the CHMOD permissions on the /cache subdirectory to 777.
- You’re done and ready to rock and roll! Go to the root directory of yournewdomain.com and start entering some of your own bookmarks.
You’ll find that the social bookmarking crowd will find your site by searching for certain unique Scuttle keyword phrases, such as “store, share and tag your favorite links” and “inurl:sort=url_asc”.
However, it is much better to speed up the procedure by doing some social bookmarking on your own so that your site will be seen and indexed more quickly. I suggest you submit your new site to Digg, StumbleUpon, and a few other well-known sites.