Tech Note: New Sharing Tool
Science | Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 6:25:42 pm PST
We’re trying out a new tool that lets you easily share LGF articles at a whole passel of social networking sites; Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Reddit, Propeller, Newsvine, Facebook, MySpace, etc. etc.
The tool is AddThis. I removed ShareThis for testing purposes; we were having occasional connection problems with ShareThis that slowed down the loading of our pages.
So far AddThis seems quicker and less obtrusive, but we’ll give it a couple of days to see how it performs in comparison to ShareThis.
Here’s a tech tip for the geeks dwelling amongst us. The default AddThis code, which is supposed to be embedded following each article, looks like this:
We discovered that you can put the last line (which loads the Javascript popup code from the AddThis servers) in the <head> section of the page just once, and eliminate it from the other instances where you want an AddThis button. On the LGF front page, this saves dozens of unnecessary calls to the AddThis servers.
UPDATE at 1/9/09 1:39:18 pm:
Correction to that last paragraph: you can load the AddThis Javascript file in the <head> section of the page—except if the browser is Microsoft Internet Explorer, which will occasionally crash with a cryptic “Operation Aborted” error message if you do. The solution for IE is to put that last line of code somewhere in the <body> section of the page instead.
