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Why to use Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus share links and not buttons

garron.me

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Re: Why to use Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus share links and not buttons

#41

Post by aethr »

untog wrote: post #35

...and find your click rates plummet. Which is fine if you're OK with that cost. But a lot of users aren't going to notice those links, let alone select them, copy them and paste them. If I already have to copy and paste a link, why not the actual page URL?

Why wouldn't users be able to click links? He is simply providing URLs for popular social sites that can be used in link hrefs to share the page being viewed. Ie,

http://facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://url-of-the-post

You use this to make regular links that users can click, instead of buttons loaded inside iframes, etc.

Re: Why to use Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus share links and not buttons

#44

Post by minimaxir »

g-garron wrote: post #14
minimaxir wrote: post #13

Another note: you can create realistic share buttons by fetching the Like counts via JavaScript. I run that on my own website and it works well.

Can you give me your website url, please?

Whoops, it's in the profile. Sorry about that. (last time I linked directly to my website in a HN comment as an example of the implementation it was accused as self-promotion.)

It's not super advanced JS but it gets the job done.

Re: Why to use Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus share links and not buttons

#45

Post by gingerlime »

lazerwalker wrote: post #29
g-garron wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, you are right. it is NetDNA's From the performance point of view is better to use that public CDN. But they have control over the javascript, and they may change it at anytime. Maybe too paranoid, so just thinking about it.

If you're that paranoid, it probably wouldn't be hard to set up a simple cron job that downloads the CDN's copy and compares its hash against a known local copy on a regular interval.

but the CDN provider might 'fingerprint' the script based on IP/frequency/headers etc and always return one version, whilst returning a different version to others... ? ;-)

Re: Why to use Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus share links and not buttons

#46

Post by e12e »

lazerwalker wrote: post #29
g-garron wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, you are right. it is NetDNA's From the performance point of view is better to use that public CDN. But they have control over the javascript, and they may change it at anytime. Maybe too paranoid, so just thinking about it.

If you're that paranoid, it probably wouldn't be hard to set up a simple cron job that downloads the CDN's copy and compares its hash against a known local copy on a regular interval.

There's no guarantee that the cron script and the end user would be getting the same data. So that's not really much help.

Re: Why to use Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus share links and not buttons

#47

Post by nhebb »

This is a great write-up with a simple solution - one that I recently realized that I needed.

I put the AddThis button block on some of my article pages at the beginning of May. I was getting less click-throughs to my product page, so I started looking into possible causes. The Site Speed reports in Google Analytics showed that my page load times had increased 2-3x. I profiled some of the slower pages and found that the AddThis external call stack can be pretty deep. After removing them, everything's nice and speedy again, and click-throughs are back up to normal levels.

Re: Why to use Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus share links and not buttons

#48

Post by yogsototh »

I made a similar article recently. I provide a complete block which you could copy/paste on your website directly. It uses javascript to create the right link using the current url.

http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Social-link-the-righ...

Re: Why to use Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus share links and not buttons

#49

Post by justadude »

qxcv wrote: post #31

If you still like the idea of buttons, but don't want to give up using the vendor-supplied buttons themselves, you can use the "two clicks for more privacy" jQuery plugin[0], which only loads the actual button when the user enables it by clicking a greyed-out placeholder. [0] http://panzi.github.io/SocialSharePrivacy/

I'm also partial to Socialite JS [0] - it provides a similar mechanism, the one I use is the hover option, this negates the need for clicking which I think would confuse some users.

[0] http://socialitejs.com/

Re: Why to use Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus share links and not buttons

#50

Post by johnpowell »

dfc wrote: post #33

This seems like a great time to plug RequestPolicy: "ReuestPolicy is a Firefox extension that improves the privacy and security of your browsing by giving you control over when cross-site requests are allowed by webpages you visit."[1] It is even better if you pair it with NoScript.[2] Whenever I toy with the idea of switching to Chrome I am always end up sticking with iceweasel because of the lack of equivalent RP+N…

I used to use RequestPolicy and thought it was great and did what it said it would. But it broke a lot of things like buying something on Newegg. I was afraid to allow something and try again thinking I would be charged twice.

Ghostery, while not as strict seems like a nice compromise. My mom uses it and she doesn't even notice it.

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