I recently decided that I wanted to have a block displayed in a sidebar on my site containing icons and links to my social media profiles - <ahref="http://twitter.com/opdavies">Twitter</a>, <ahref="http://facebook.com/opdavies">Facebook</a> etc. I tried the <ahref="http://drupal.org/project/follow">Follow</a> module, but it lacked the option to add extra networks such my <ahref="http://drupal.org/user/381388">Drupal.org</a> account, and my <ahref="http://oliverdavies.co.uk/rss.xml">RSS feed</a>. I started to create my own version, and then found <ahref="http://www.hankpalan.com/blog/drupal-themes/add-your-social-connections-drupal-icons">this Blog post</a> by Hank Palan.
I created a 'Social icon' content type with the body field removed, and with fields for a link and image - then downloaded the favicons from the appropriate websites to use.
However, instead of using a custom template (node-custom.tpl.php) file, I used the Views module.
I added fields for the node titles, and the link from the node's content. Both of these are excluded from being displayed on the site. I then re-wrote the output of the Icon field to create the link using the URL, and using the node's title as the image's alternative text and the link's title.
I also used the <ahref="http://drupal.org/project/nodequeue">Nodequeue</a> module to create a nodequeue and arrange the icons in the order that I wanted them to be displayed. Once this was added as a relationship within my View, I was able to use node's position in the nodequeue as the sort criteria.
To complete the process, I used the <ahref="http://drupal.org/project/css_injector">CSS Injector</a> module to add some additional CSS styling to position and space out the icons.
