A few weeks ago, I wrote about adding a Tweet button to a self-hosted WordPress blog, and followed up by writing about using a little CSS trickery to align the Tweet button (thanks to Alex Coles). Whilst I was implementing the Tweet Button, I also went about putting a Facebook Share button on each post.
There are plug-ins to do this for me but why use a plugin when the answer is just a single lines of code in two files within the template?
In the same paragraph as the Tweet button (i.e. styled with the same class), I used this code, generated using the Facebook Share Button generator:
This time, the code is identical for both index.php and single.php as, unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t seem to give me any control over the title of the link (it just takes the </code> tag from the page). <a href="http://askville.amazon.com/add-Share-Facebook-button-webpage/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=1539369">There is another method, using query string parameters in the URL</a> but I chose to stick with Facebook’s recommended method.</p>
<p>Incidentally, I chose to Share, rather than <a href="http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like">Like (which can be implemented by following these guidelines)</a> because they have subtly different purposes and <a href="http://daggle.com/facebook-button-facebook-share-keeping-1792">each is represented in a slightly different manner (as Danny Sullivan describes in his post on the subject)</a>. After reading Danny’s post, I agree that Share is best for linking to a single post, whilst Like is more suited to the site as a whole (someone might <em>Like</em> markwilson.it and <em>Share</em> one or more posts from the site).</p>
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<h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/2010/08/more-on-implementing-twitters-tweet-button.htm" rel="bookmark">More on implementing Twitter’s Tweet button</a></h2>
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<span class="posted-on">Posted on <a href="https://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/2010/08/more-on-implementing-twitters-tweet-button.htm" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published" datetime="2010-08-26T18:51:56+01:00">Thursday 26 August 2010</time></a></span><span class="byline"> By <span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="https://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/author/mark-wilson">Mark Wilson</a></span></span> </div><!-- .entry-meta -->
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<p>A week or so back, I wrote about <a href="https://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/2010/08/adding-a-tweet-button-to-a-self-hosted-wordpress-blog.htm">putting a Tweet button onto a self-hosted WordPress blog</a>. The method I used was fine – it works – but I was struggling to place the button within my page (I knew where to put it in my code but it seemed to display in the wrong place sometimes, as a result of some of the floats that the stylesheet applies).</p>
<p>That’s when I called in my buddy <a href="http://www.alexcoles.com/">Alex</a>: XHTML and CSS wizard; and fixer of many things on this site.</p>
<p>He spotted that, even though <a href="http://dev.twitter.com/pages/tweet-button">Twitter gives us three options for implementing the Tweet button: JavaScript, IFrame, and roll your own</a>, the <a href="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js">JavaScript implementation</a> also uses an IFrame.</p>
<p>The trouble with this is that IFrames are bad. Well, not really bad, but certainly deprecated for Strict HTML and XHTML, and certainly not the direction I want to be heading in for a compliant site. Ideally, I would find another way around the issue but rolling my own Tweet button doesn’t look great) and Twitter’s implementation uses several images in one file, just showing the appropriate section of the image. I could use this, with image replacement techniques for hover and click (which is what Twitter do) but, to be honest, that was a little out of my league, so IFrames it is…</p>
<p>Alex helped me style up the button – if you want to do something similar, this was the CSS that he used:</p>
<p><dirtycode:noclick>p.social-media {margin-top: -15px;}<br />
iframe.twitter-share-button {float: left; margin-right: 1em;}</dirtycode></p>
<p>Together with adding <code>class="social-media"</code> to the <code></p>
<p></code> tag in the code to display the tweet button so that it now reads:</p>
<p><dirtycode:noclick></p>
<p class="social-media"><a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>” data-text=”<?php the_title(); ?>” data-count=”none” data-via=”markwilsonit”>Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script></p>
<p></dirtycode></p>
<p>When I asked him how this works, he explained that the class on the <code></p>
<p></code> is just to close up the top margin; the real magic is floating just the Tweet button (which cured the CSS float issues that had been frustrating me).</p>
<p>Of course, there may be plugins to display buttons like Tweet, Facebook Share/Like, etc. but when something only takes a couple of lines of code, I’d rather implement it natively than add to the list of plugins running on my WordPress installation.</p>
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I spotted the same strange characters at the head of the file (they showed up in