Even though I just wrote about using ShareThis, I am not in love with the service. I would much rather have the buttons embedded into the page itself, that means more to me than having ShareThis track the stats. One of my biggest complaints about ShareThis is once you have completed sharing to XYZ network, it asks you to sign up for ShareThis, and you have to click the close (X) to get rid of the layer.
I now have the most popular services embedded into the footer. I already wrote about the Twitter button, however I am not happy with that, either. I need the script to open a new window, preferably sized. I am going to seep some Javascript help for that.
Another reason I have decided to abandon ShareThis is because of having the addJS script in the header, sometimes Safari would actually load the ShareThis widget above the BGVN bar at the very top of the page.
I find it odd that all of the other social networks can take a URL or a title that is not URL encoded (meaning + or %20 for spaces in the title and %2F for a forward slash), every single one of them can take a normal URL or a normal title and convert it on their end - all but Twitter. This means you can use <$mt:EntryPermalink$> and <$MTEntryTitle encode_html="0"> after you figure out the syntax for each site's submit script.
Delicious offers a snippet of code written for Movable Type, but could not get it to work, I just used the normal JavaScript one. It does not do a round trip back to the originating article, but opens a sized window, which I prefer.
The final bit of work I needed to complete for the Spread the Word footer was the "email to a friend" feature. This is using the Share plugin, and embeds a form on the page to email the entry to a friend. Give it a shot, click the letter icon below. I am using the Slicker jQuery library to toggle the form, it works pretty well, and was a snap to setup.
Another reason I have decided to abandon ShareThis is because of having the addJS script in the header, sometimes Safari would actually load the ShareThis widget above the BGVN bar at the very top of the page.
I find it odd that all of the other social networks can take a URL or a title that is not URL encoded (meaning + or %20 for spaces in the title and %2F for a forward slash), every single one of them can take a normal URL or a normal title and convert it on their end - all but Twitter. This means you can use <$mt:EntryPermalink$> and <$MTEntryTitle encode_html="0"> after you figure out the syntax for each site's submit script.
Delicious offers a snippet of code written for Movable Type, but could not get it to work, I just used the normal JavaScript one. It does not do a round trip back to the originating article, but opens a sized window, which I prefer.
The final bit of work I needed to complete for the Spread the Word footer was the "email to a friend" feature. This is using the Share plugin, and embeds a form on the page to email the entry to a friend. Give it a shot, click the letter icon below. I am using the Slicker jQuery library to toggle the form, it works pretty well, and was a snap to setup.
Leave a comment