The aThumbs service was designed with the idea of being able to provide everyone with a free and easy to use thumb service, which was originally inspired by Xanga’s eProps.
To use the aThumbs service, you must register and log in (if you have not already done so). After you log in, you should see aThumbs in the list of available services. Upon clicking to access it you’ll be taken to a page consisting of a list of thumb sets that you’ve created already, and a form for creating an additional thumb set. Upon filling out the form with the name of the thumb set, you’ll have the opportunity to return to the aThumbs page where you can see if it did indeed get added to the list of your thumb sets.
So you have a thumb set, now what?
You will likely want to put the following code in your template:
<script type="text/javascript"
src="https://www.andrewsw.com/aThumbs/get_thumbs.py?siteName=YourSiteName&thumbName=YourThumbID&js=1">
</script>
but you will want to replace YourSiteName with the name of the thumb set that you created and you will want to replace YourThumbID with something identifying the item(s) that you’re providing thumb(s) for – typically this thumb system would be used for providing thumbs for blog posts, for example, and the YourThumbID would be replace the the blog post ID. Consult the documentation for your blogging system for how to insert the blog post ID.
This does not check for referrer information, so you can embed the thumbs in your feeds and have them be viewed in web-based feed readers with no consequences.
Thumbs are on a per IP address basis, so no one can vote multiple times unless they have multiple IP addresses. You can change your vote at any time.
If you want the thumb layout to be vertical instead of horizontal, change the “js=1” to “js=2”. To just have an HTML display in a page, and not javascript, leave off the “&js=1” all together.
Additional features are planned, must of which involve non-user-level features (REST interface, RSS feed, etc…). Not the least of which is better documentation.