Using Alternative Social Buttons with Nikola

Version:: 8.2.3

The Default

By Default, the themes provided with Nikola will add to your pages a "slide in" widget at the bottom right of the page, provided by Addthis. This is the HTML code for that:

<!-- Social buttons -->
<div id="addthisbox" class="addthis_toolbox addthis_peekaboo_style
    addthis_default_style addthis_label_style addthis_32x32_style">
<a class="addthis_button_more">Share</a>
<ul><li><a class="addthis_button_facebook"></a>
<li><a class="addthis_button_google_plusone_share"></a>
<li><a class="addthis_button_linkedin"></a>
<li><a class="addthis_button_twitter"></a>
</ul>
</div>
<script src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=ra-4f7088a56bb93798"></script>
<!-- End of social buttons -->
"""

You can change that using the SOCIAL_BUTTONS_CODE option in your conf.py. In some cases, just doing that will be enough but in others, it won't. This document tries to describe all the bits involved in making this work correctly.

Part 1: SOCIAL_BUTTONS_CODE

Social sharing services like addthis and others will provide you a HTML snippet. If it is self-contained, then just setting SOCIAL_BUTTONS_CODE may be enough. Try :-)

Part 2: The theme

The SOCIAL_BUTTONS_CODE HTML fragment will be embedded somewhere by the theme. Whether that is the correct place or not is not something the theme author can truly know, so it is possible that you may have to tweak the base.html template to make it look good.

Part 3: BODY_END and EXTRA_HEAD_DATA

Some social sharing code requires JS execution that depends on JQuery being available (example: SocialSharePrivacy). It's good practice (and often, the only way that will work) to put those at the end of <BODY>, and one easy way to do that is to put them in BODY_END

On the other hand, it's possible that it requires you to load some CSS files. The right place for that is in the document's <HEAD> so they should be added in EXTRA_HEAD_DATA

Part 4: assets

For sharing code that doesn't rely on a social sharing service, you may need to add CSS, Image, or JS files to your site

ShareNice

ShareNice is "written in order to provide social sharing features to web developers and website administrators who wish to maintain and protect their users' privacy" which sounds cool to me.

Let's go step by step into integrating the hosted version of ShareNice into a Nikola site.

For testing purposes, let's do it on a demo site:

$ nikola init --demo sharenice_test
A new site with example data has been created at sharenice_test.
See README.txt in that folder for more information.
$ cd sharenice_test/

To see what's going on, let's start Nikola in "auto mode". This should build the site and open a web browser showing the default configuration, with the AddThis widget:

$ nikola auto -b

First, let's add the HTML snippet that will show the sharing options. In your conf.py, set this, which is the HTML code suggested by ShareNice:

SOCIAL_BUTTONS_CODE = """<div id="shareNice" data-share-label="Share"
    data-color-scheme="black" data-icon-size="32" data-panel-bottom="plain"
    data-services="plus.google.com,facebook.com,digg.com,email,delicious.com,twitter.com"
    style="float:right"></div>"""

BODY_END = """<script src="https://graingert.co.uk/shareNice/code.js"></script>"""

And you should now see a sharing box at the bottom right of the page.

Main problem remaining is that it doesn't really look good and integrated in the page layout. I suggest changing the code to this which looks nicer, but still has some placement issues:

SOCIAL_BUTTONS_CODE = """<div id="shareNice" data-share-label="Share"
    data-color-scheme="black" data-icon-size="32" data-panel-bottom="plain"
    data-services="plus.google.com,facebook.com,email,twitter.com"
    style="position: absolute; left: 20px; top: 60px;"></div>"""

If anyone comes up with a better idea of styling/placement, just let me know ;-)

One bad bit of this so far is that you are now using a script from another site, and that doesn't let Nikola perform as many optimizations to your page as it could. So, if you really want to go the extra mile to save a few KB and round trips, you could install your own copy from the github repo and use that instead of the copy at ShareNice.

Then, you can create your own theme inheriting from the one you are using and add the CSS and JS files from ShareNice into your bundles configuration so they are combined and minified.

SocialSharePrivacy

The Hard Way

SocialSharePrivacy is "a jQuery plugin that lets you add social share buttons to your website that don't allow the social sites to track your users." Nice!

Let's go step-by-step into integrating SocialSharePrivacy into a Nikola site. To improve privacy, they recommend you not use the hosted service so we'll do it the hard way, by getting and distributing everything in our own site.

https://github.com/panzi/SocialSharePrivacy

For testing purposes, let's do it on a demo site:

$ nikola init --demo ssp_test
A new site with example data has been created at ssp_test.
See README.txt in that folder for more information.
$ cd ssp_test/

To see what's going on, let's start Nikola in "auto mode". This should build the site and open a web browser showing the default configuration, with the AddThis widget:

$ nikola auto -b

Now, download the current version and unzip it. You will have a SocialSharePrivacy-master folder with lots of stuff in it.

First, we need to build it (this requires a working and modern uglifyjs, this may not be easy):

$ cd SocialSharePrivacy-master
$ sh build.sh -m gplus,twitter,facebook,mail -s "/assets/css/socialshareprivacy.css" -a off

You will now have several files in a build folder. We need to bring them into the site:

$ cp -Rv SocialSharePrivacy-master/build/* files/
$ cp -R SocialSharePrivacy-master/images/ files/assets/

Edit your conf.py:

BODY_END = """
<script src="/javascripts/jquery.socialshareprivacy.min.js"></script>
<script>
$(document).ready(function () {
    $('.share').socialSharePrivacy();
});
</script>
"""

SOCIAL_BUTTONS_CODE = """<div class="share"></div>"""

In my experience this produces a broken, duplicate, semi-working thing. YMMV and if you make it work correctly, let me know how :-)

The Easy Way

Go to https://panzi.github.io/SocialSharePrivacy/ and use the provided form to get the code. Make sure you check "I already use JQuery" if you are using one of the themes that require it, like site or default, select the services you want, and use your disqus name if you have one.

It will give you 3 code snippets:

"Insert this once in the head of your page": Put it in BODY_END
"Insert this wherever you want a share widget displayed": Put it in SOCIAL_BUTTONS_CODE
"Insert this once anywhere after the other code": Put it in BODY_END

That should give you a working integration (not tested)

Riff