Meddelare Social Buttons Share Count Fetcher meddelare-node-counters

⚠️ The Meddelare Social Buttons project has been shut down as of 2020-12-07. No updates will be made and the source code will possibly be deleted in the future. Please download what you need as soon as possible.

Install custom social share counters on your website with your own hosted solution, which only makes a single API request and loads minimal or zero assets to display the counters.

Check out meddelare.com and view examples on meddelare.com/meddelare-examples.

Share count fetcher

Node.js promise-based, asynchronous, parallel, per-URL social network share count fetcher -- the base of Meddelare.

• If you want a ready-made standalone Meddelare server, check out meddelare-node-server.
• If you want to use Meddelare in an existing Express server, check out meddelare-node-express.

Features

• Retrieval is asynchronous and uses bluebird promises.
• Calls social networks in parallel from the server, making it (approximately) as fast to get the count from one as several at once.
• Can be used for both server-side and client-side logic, for example calculating daily statistics or backing a sharing widget.
• Super-fast in-memory cache keeps the most recent results per network and url.

Getting started

Install package in your project folder

npm install --save meddelare-counters

Fetch counts from social networks

var MeddelareCounters = require("meddelare-counters"),
    meddelareCounters = new MeddelareCounters();

// Use your own website here, or a specific page url.
var url = "https://meddelare.com/",
    networks = [
        "facebook",
        "twitter",
        "googleplus",
    ];

meddelareCounters.retrieveCounts(url, networks)
    .then(function(results) {
        console.log("Success!", results);
    })
    .catch(function(err) {
        console.error("Fail!", err);
    });

Url
Use the url parameter to specify the address which you want to retrieve the number of shares for.

• Include https:// or http:// in the URL.
• You can use your domain root, or a more specific url pointing to a specific page.
• The value must not be URL-encoded.
  • Each network has a different way of retrieving the share count. Therefore each network decides to use URL-encoding if necessary.
  • This prevents problems when looking up values for pages with, for example, parameters separated by & by avoiding double-encoding the address.

Networks
Currently Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus are supported.

Use the networks parameter to specify which ones you want to use, as an array of strings, for example ["facebook", "twitter", "googleplus"] or ["facebook"].

Returns

The function returns a Promise. It resolves using .then(function(result){ ... }) for most cases, only rejecting using .catch(function(err){ ... }) when something exceptional happens -- but please expect and implement both.

If a request to a social network failed, a count of -1 is returned for that network.

{
  "facebook": 5281,
  "googleplus": 42,
  "twitter": 8719
}

Configuration

Configure the middleware instance at creation time, for example new MeddelareCounters({ unknownCount: 0 }).

These are the default values.

{
    // A reference to an object that implements `log`, `info`, `warn`, `error`.
    logger: console,

    // Cache results in memory -- but keep good and bad (error thrown) results for different periods of time.
    // (In milliseconds.)
    memoryCache: {
        goodResultTimeout: 4 * 60 * 1000,
        badResultTimeout: 1 * 60 * 1000,
        timeoutResultTimeout: 10 * 1000,
    },

    // Return this value if none was found or an error was thrown.
    unknownCount: -1,
}

Thanks

Many thanks goes out to Taskforce for their social-buttons-server (released into the Public Domain) -- especially the creator @thomasdavis and contributor @beaugunderson. This software, meddelare-node-counters, is based on their work.

Copyright (c) 2015 Team Meddelare https://meddelare.com/ All rights reserved.

When using meddelare-node-counters, comply to the MIT license.