The Facebook share button is no longer used, now it is a like. However this plug in gives you the box that pops up and allows people to enter in text to share on their time line.
Thread Starter
Ovidiu
(@ovidiu)
That’s really weird. I installed it and tested it and it only allowed me to LIKE.
I just tried again after your reply here and indeed it works as you said.
I guess that was just a glitch.
Btw. the weird “flickering” is still present when one hovers over the icons, they disappear for about 1 second until the scripts are loaded, is there no remedy for that in sight?
Ovidiu,
That is how we actually make the plugin as fast as it is. Because we don’t load the scripts on initial page load which helps with SEO and UX. When you bring your mouse over, Facebook and Google+ scripts are loaded. That’s why it takes that one second flickering.
Syed,
I agree with the other folks, I agree speed is good, but the flickering is different than what people expect and it flickers at the exact moment people are going to be clicking the “like” button. That seems like a bad user experience to be honest. For one it makes it look like something is wrong with the social sharers, and two it could possibly cause mis-clicks. Any way to allow this to be an option, or create a way to use the traditional shares that people are use to fast?
There is no way to load the plugin fast if we load traditional buttons. We can get rid of the like functionality and open it in a new window like shares do.
Will look into adding that functionality, so users have an option to use socialite or not.
Syed,
The speed gain between this plug in, and a traditional sharer plug in is milliseconds. Any seo gain you would get by the very small speed increase would be way surpassed by all of the social sharers one may miss by using the plug in (and the sharers not behaving as visitors expect them to behave as they do one every other site….which also greatly help seo and traffic…even more so than the very small speed increase one would gain by using this plug in.)
As you can see we reciieve a high number of social shares on our posts, so it’s critical that there are no barriers to allowing our folks quick and easy access to the share buttons. Here’s an example of the sort of social shares we can receive: http://noahsdad.com/target-down-syndrome/
Thread Starter
Ovidiu
(@ovidiu)
I totally understand the way you load the buttons and LOVE the idea. In Europe some people were quite concerned that social media sites track all their movements because if you visit a website that loads these share/like buttons the traditional way while you’re logged in i.e. with FB, FB knows you’ve visited that site so this method is awesome for people concerned about their privacy but the flickering is bad.
As I see, the moment I hover, you hide the icons, load the scripts and replace the icon with the script.
Could it be possible to load the scripts the moment one hovers but only hide the images when the script has finished loading? That would do away with the flickering?
Ovidiu,
We would have to look into that. The point of releasing this plugin was to give users the same functionality that we have on WPBeginner (because a lot of them asked for it).
I think in the short term, we will probably allow users to disable socialite (i.e load real buttons if they don’t care for the load time and definitely want to avoid flickering).
For the long run, we will look into finding a better solution.
Thread Starter
Ovidiu
(@ovidiu)
Sure, I understand. Thanks for the brilliant plugin 🙂
Thread Starter
Ovidiu
(@ovidiu)
@syed: I jsut found something slightly weird and am not sure if it is your plugin or the stats plugin that reports this but all of a sudden, in my statistics reported by WP Slimstat I find each post twice.
Once like this:
http://foodandchatter.co.za/151/meet-new-people-patricia-manning/?fb_action_ids=600198183358873&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=[481042171990832]&action_type_map=[
and once like this:
http://foodandchatter.co.za/151/meet-new-people-patricia-manning/
Could this be related to your plugin somehow?
Don’t think that it is related to our plugin.
Thread Starter
Ovidiu
(@ovidiu)
It was just a guess since yours is the only plugin related to social media that I use…
Will see what the author of the stats plugin has to say 🙂
