meddelare-counters

Meddelare Social Buttons Share Count Fetcher meddelare-node-counters

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!

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-expess.

Features

• Get counts from multiple social networks in a single API call, returned as a javascript object literal.
• Retrieval is asynchronous and uses bluebird promises.
• The library calls social networks in parallel, making it (approximately) as fast to get the count from one as several at once.
• 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 SocialButtonsCounts = require("meddelare-counters"),
    socialButtonsCounts = new SocialButtonsCounts();

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

socialButtonsCounts.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, for example http://meddelare.com or a more specific url poiting to a specific page.

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 SocialButtonsCounts({ 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.

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

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