👋

I’ve always found it overly complicating to attach the famous Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet and most recently the Google +1 buttons on appropriate locations. Adding these buttons with the provider provided code involves adding blocking javascript which could cause your whole site to not load at all, significantly increase total page load, lead to unwanted javascript errors and could break the existing layout. Next to those issues: positioning the buttons, adding/removing providers and creating a common layout between the buttons is a huge hassle.
While not implementing these buttons is of course an option, the push from search engines to promote retweeted links, likes & +1-ed pages of friends in their search results could harm your competitive position.

For DirectLyrics I recently created a one-stop solution which solves all the issues these buttons cause. Key issues that needed solving: quick & fast loads (2kb gzipped), wide provider support (5), and non-blocking.

Result:

• Easy install on any page by including an iframe which refers to a CDN hosted, long term cached html file.
• Control variables on layout, supported providers, relevant url. Passed as #hash (keeps the file completely cached for users).
• Support both (native) tall counters as well the wide layout including the counters.
• Providers: Facebook (Link and Send), Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and Google +1.
• Non-load blocking by using smart async javascript loaders.

This is an early and quick release, but I’m planning on supporting this for a while. You can download the source, or hotlink to the CDN version.

Setting

Example iframe:

Implementation settings go here

Sample