SocialCount

Copyright (c) 2012 Filament Group, developed by @zachleat. MIT licensed.

Related: Filament Group Lab Post

The problems with social networking widgets are well documented. They're heavy and slow to load especially on high-latency mobile connections.

SocialCount is a small jQuery plugin for progressively enhanced, lazy loaded, mobile friendly social networking widgets.

• Currently supports Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.
• 1.12 kB CSS and 2.73 kB JS (after Min+GZip—compared to 366 kB, or 100 kB repeat view, for Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus widgets)
• 1 JS request, 1 CSS request, 1 optional request for icons (compared to 21 total requests for Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus widgets)
• Easy to fit in with existing page design
• Ability to share without JavaScript or before JavaScript has loaded.
• Works with mouse, touchscreen, or keyboard.
  • Mouse: On hover, loads a social network's native widget so that the user can Like/Recommend/+1 without leaving the current page.
  • Touch screen: simple redirects to dedicated network share pages.
  • Keyboard: Concise tab order.
• Intelligent client-side caching so that two or more widgets with the same share URL only make one AJAX request.
• Requires jQuery 1.6+

Note that while this project is named SocialCount, the server side code to fetch the share counts was removed. Both Twitter and Facebook have or will remove their public share count APIs. This functionality is going bye bye.

SocialCount Demo

Getting Started

Install via NPM (npm install --save fg-socialcount).

Alternatively, the following archive contains both minified (socialcount.min.js+socialcount.min.css) and unminified (socialcount.js+socialcount.css) versions of the JS and CSS required to use SocialCount.

By default, the social networking icons are not included. However, SocialCount publishes a version that does include the social networking icons: Use the regular socialcount.js with socialcount-with-icons.css or socialcount-with-icons.min.css and the included SD and HD image sprites.

Download socialcount.zip

Markup with icons:

Customize the sample markup below or use the provided markup generator.

<!-- Replace YOUR_CUSTOM_URL with the URL you're sharing -->

<ul class="socialcount" data-url="YOUR_CUSTOM_URL">

<li class="facebook"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=YOUR_CUSTOM_URL" title="Share on Facebook"><span class="social-icon icon-facebook"></span><span class="count">Like</span></a></li>

<li class="twitter"><a href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=YOUR_CUSTOM_URL" title="Share on Twitter"><span class="social-icon icon-twitter"></span><span class="count">Tweet</span></a></li>

<li class="googleplus"><a href="https://plus.google.com/share?url=YOUR_CUSTOM_URL" title="Share on Google Plus"><span class="social-icon icon-googleplus"></span><span class="count">+1</span></a></li>

</ul>

Tested with

• Chrome Desktop 23
• Firefox 16
• Opera 12
• Safari 6
• Internet Explorer 7 (Links Only)
• Internet Explorer 8
• Internet Explorer 9
• Internet Explorer 10
• Windows Phone 7.5

Touchscreens (Links Only)

• BlackBerry 5
• BlackBerry 6.1
• BlackBerry 7
• iOS 6
• Chrome for iOS 21
• Android 2.3

Contributing

Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint and test your JavaScript code using grunt and the grunt qunit command.

Release History

• v0.1.0 Initial release
• v0.1.1 Fix for IE (tested up to 9) issue with iframes and :hover rules
• v0.1.2 Default AJAX request for counts to false, added zip download, better documentation for counts service.
• v0.1.3 Added code to normalize service url directory (easier configuration).
• v0.1.4 Fix for twitter widget share of non-current page URL. Added data-share-text.
• v0.1.5 Option for activate on click, instead of hover. i18n Code, adds de_DE support. Fix for Google+ issue with disappearing tooltip. Local url filtering on counts service. More accurate Facebook counts.
• v0.1.6 Added Pinterest button. Thanks @dustMason! Fix for IE10 support (wasn’t passing A-Grade test). Facebook button requires long form locale. Tweaks to German button sizes.
• v0.1.7 Bug fix: #42
• v0.1.8 Bug fix: #45
• v0.1.9
• v0.2.0 Removes Twitter from service, per Twitter’s API retirement.

Advanced Options

• SocialCount.activateOnClick = false; Global option to switch from load triggering on hover to a manual click.
• SocialCount.thousandCharacter = 'K'; SocialCount.millionCharacter = 'M'; i18n Strings.
• Use SocialCount.load( $element ) to programmatically load all of the SocialCount buttons in the $element object. You can pass a container with multiple types of buttons or a single button.