Friday, January 4, 2013

Social Media Buttons

Folks
Just finished an afternoon of adding social media buttons to my web site.
I had started to add individual Google +1 buttons here and there (Instructions here: https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/+1button/)  and then I moved on to learning about Facebook "Like" and "Share" buttons  (Instructions here http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/).
I finished it off by adding a link to my LinkedIn page. This was really just a plain HREF to my LinkedIn profile surrounding a Linkedin "In" icon.

I ran into a few fairly common problems when trying to match up all of the different buttons. One of the main issues is that many of the social media buttons will expand and/or pop-up when the user mouses over them. So placing the buttons and getting them consistent can be a bit tricky.

Since I code all of my web pages by hand, I have a lo of fine grained control over this but it takes some tinkering to get things working right.  In the end, I came up with a solution of using a borderless table
<TABLE BORDER=0 CELLPADDING=0>
Then placing each of the buttons in a cell of the table.

Since most of the social media buttons will take the current web page as the "source" of the "like" or +1, it makes it easy to just add these codes to every page. My web hosting company supports server side includes so I was able to make a small "social_media.shtml" file containing the various JavaScript parts and my table with a row of buttons.  Now I can easily add this setup to any web page using a #include statement.

It is still not looking quite as slick as what you see on a WordPress site but it is getting the job done for now.

Have a look at www.holowczak.com/tutorial.html for example and let me know what you think.

Cheers,

Rich H.

8 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Filament
    In a single WordPress plugin, Filament contains a group of useful features including Flare, a social share button plugin that makes it easy for others to share your blogpost on Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, and more—even spots like Hacker News and Reddit. Other Filament apps include: MailChimp subscribe form, Google Analytics tracking, all-in-one profiles, code management, and share highlighter.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Filament
    In a single WordPress plugin, Filament contains a group of useful features including Flare, a social share button plugin that makes it easy for others to share your blogpost on Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, and more—even spots like Hacker News and Reddit. Other Filament apps include: MailChimp subscribe form, Google Analytics tracking, all-in-one profiles, code management, and share highlighter.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Filament
    In a single WordPress plugin, Filament contains a group of useful features including Flare, a social share button plugin that makes it easy for others to share your blogpost on Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, and more—even spots like Hacker News and Reddit. Other Filament apps include: MailChimp subscribe form, Google Analytics tracking, all-in-one profiles, code management, and share highlighter.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Filament
    In a single WordPress plugin, Filament contains a group of useful features including Flare, a social share button plugin that makes it easy for others to share your blogpost on Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, and more—even spots like Hacker News and Reddit. Other Filament apps include: MailChimp subscribe form, Google Analytics tracking, all-in-one profiles, code management, and share highlighter.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Filament
    In a single WordPress plugin, Filament contains a group of useful features including Flare, a social share button plugin that makes it easy for others to share your blogpost on Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, and more—even spots like Hacker News and Reddit. Other Filament apps include: MailChimp subscribe form, Google Analytics tracking, all-in-one profiles, code management, and share highlighter.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Filament
    In a single WordPress plugin, Filament contains a group of useful features including Flare, a social share button plugin that makes it easy for others to share your blogpost on Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, and more—even spots like Hacker News and Reddit. Other Filament apps include: MailChimp subscribe form, Google Analytics tracking, all-in-one profiles, code management, and share highlighter.

    ReplyDelete