Tech Note: The Retweet Button
Our latest addition to The Blog codebase is a button to let you “retweet” an LGF article. “Retweeting” is a common way for people to spread interesting content around on Twitter. Since each article is already automatically posted to Twitter, your tweet is prefaced with the standard Twitter syntax to show that it’s a retweet from the LGF Twitter account, with the letters “RT’ for ReTweet, followed by the ‘@’ symbol and the username of the original tweetist: ‘RT @lizardoid’.
The code is basically John Resig’s Easy Retweet Button, with the CSS styles extracted into my main CSS file instead of embedded in the Javascript. This retweet function uses the LGF account with bit.ly, a URL shortener that tracks statistics; the number shown above the green Retweet button is the number of incoming clicks from the bit.ly URL for that article — in other words, the Twitter traffic for that article.
Right now, the Retweet button is only visible on the individual page for an article (either with or without comments) at the lower left of main article, next to the rating buttons.
UPDATE at 11/1/09 6:45:11 pm:
Retweet buttons are now on the front page, too, unless bit.ly lets me know the server load is too much.
Frank says: