I made a Facebook and Twitter sharing link making app thing
A couple of weeks ago I went to the brilliant HackBmth hosted at RedWeb and hacked together a little tool to make my (and my colleagues) life easier when creating Facebook and Twitter sharing links to be used in emails, blog posts or anywhere really…
You fill in some fields (without needing to manually UTF-8 encode spaces and special characters) then you get URL’s you can use to spread the word about something..
Try this Twitter link or this Facebook one*1 to see what happens… don’t worry it won’t post anything without asking!
Now I’ll be the first to admit it was rough around the edges but functionally it worked! Woot! In just one day of coding, some rusty cogs had turned in a cobwebbed corner of my brain and I had a working tool of sorts – I should also add that I haven’t coded properly for a very long time, so I’m pretty pleased.
Today I tidied it up and made a version that anyone can use.
The twitter one just helps you make a URL in the right format – still handy as it encodes any special characters into the right format.
The Facebook sharing tool requires you to make an app at developers.facebook.com first so that you can use the app ID to make a sharing URL – there’s no coding required, fill in the minimum fields to get an ID… if you need help with this bit, leave me a comment and I’ll write up making an app at a later date.
Here’s the mostly finished product: http://alukeonlife.com/app/lufta/
Please be gentle with it… if you have any questions leave me a comment!
*1 The Facebook example uses my RNLI email links app as the sender, you’ll have your own icon and app name in here
This is pretty useful and a neat coding exercise.
I’d love to use WordPress and Gravity Forms to develop this idea further and give extra options. But I’d feel like I was stealing your idea!
It’s worth noting that Twitter Intents work nicer if you include the JS library on your page somewhere:
Nice work though!
Ross
Feel free to take it on! If it helps, I’ll happily send you my code?
I’ve used gravity forms in the past, not sure why I didn’t think of that in the first place, other than I wanted a project to make from scratch perhaps.
I had thought v3 would include the JS library so it’s a pop up rather than a new window – thought about using similar for FB.