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meddelare-server

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meddelare-server

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.

1.1.0
Source
npm

Version published: 9 years ago

Weekly downloads: 3; increased by200%

Maintainers: 1

Weekly downloads

Created: 9 years ago

Source

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!

This is an open source and self-hosted alternative to sharing services such as AddThis and ShareThis. Because you run the proxy server yourself, you are also defending your users' privacy against the social networks' tracking. Users only opt in to their tracking once they decide to click a share button -- never implicitly just because they visited your page.

View examples on meddelare.github.io/meddelare-examples.

Features

Get counts from multiple social networks in one API call, delivered as JSON or JSONP.
The server calls social networks in parallel, making it (approximately) as fast to get the count from one as several at once.
No third party requirements -- you can host both the social buttons server and any resources yourself.
Proxies calls from your users to the social networks, blocking their user tracking until the user decides to click a share button.
Heroku enabled -- create an app and deploy instantly.
Sends cache control HTTP headers so you can throw a content delivery network (CDN) service, such as CloudFront, in front with ease. This should result in faster API calls and less chance of getting rate limited.

Getting started

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/meddelare/meddelare-node-server.git

cd meddelare-node-server

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Run the server
node social-buttons-server.js

Test by accessing your local server on http://localhost:5000/?networks=facebook,twitter,googleplus&url=http://meddelare.com
You can optionally push to a Heroku app to automatically deploy.

Response

See this example API call. The response is delivered as JSON, or JSONP if you specify a callback.

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

HTML Widgets

View examples on meddelare.github.io/meddelare-examples.

We would love to feature your widget design!
Please submit your design in a pull request to meddelare-examples and we will add it to our list.

You can do anything you want to display your share counts when using the API. Below is a very simple example showing the count per network -- see this example API call with text. Note that we are using a CloudFront distribution domain in the examples.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <body>
    <h3>Twitter</h3>
    <span id="twitter"></span>
    <h3>Facebook</h3>
    <span id="facebook"></span>
    <h3>Google Plus</h3>
    <span id="googleplus"></span>

    <script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
    <script>
      $.ajax("https://d12cncu17l9pr5.cloudfront.net/?networks=facebook,twitter,googleplus&url=http://meddelare.com", {
        success: function (res, err) {
          $.each(res, function (network, value) {
            $("#" + network).text(value);
          });
        }
      });
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

Options

Options are passed using query parameters in the url.

Networks
Currently Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus are supported.

You use the networks query parameter to specify which ones you want to use as a comma-separated list (no spaces), for example networks=facebook,twitter,googleplus or networks=facebook.

Url (optional)
You use the url parameter to specify the address which you want to retrieve the number of shares for, for example url=http://meddelare.com.

If you don't specify a url then the server will try to get the referring url's (HTTP Referer header) share count. This makes it easy to dynamically get the counts for the page currently open in the browser.

Callback (optional)
If you specify the callback parameter, the results will be delivered as JSONP instead of plain JSON.

Configuration

Configure the node.js server instance at launch time. Where you set the environment variable depends on your system, but examples below are using the command line.

HTTP cache time
The environment variable CACHE_TIME can be used to set the time, in seconds, that the browser (or CDN) should cache results. Cached results vary on the request query string. To set the HTTP cache to ten minutes, use CACHE_TIME=600 node social-buttons-server.js.

Cross-domain requests
The server has cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) enabled for whitelisted domains, which need to be configured in the file social-buttons-server.js.

Content delivery networks

You don't want to be hitting the social networks APIs constantly so it would be wise to throw up a cache, such as CloudFront, in front.

In CloudFront, just make sure you to inherit cache control directives from the server and enable query string forwarding. Either use your CloudFront distribution domain to access the API server or CNAME it with a custom domain of your choice.

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-server, is based on their work.

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

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Package last updated on 05 Jul 2015

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