"Follow" buttons on main page

[tresf]

Opinions wanted for follow buttons on the home page.

I personally hate them because they just put a bunch of buttons people rarely click on right in the middle of our home page (or in the case of the Digg example below, at the bottom of the page) however some services such as Google+ will only allow the pages to have a verified URL if we link them on our home page (they then crawl our home page for a link).

My proposal is to put one in the footer that's style="display:none;" so we can get the verification without the interface bloat but maybe people actually use them and I'm a bit old school?

Please share your opinion. 😈

[lukas-w]

How about some small buttons in the footer?

[tresf]

I think it would be easy enough. Do you want to try making the lame colored-labeled ones or keep them plain? We could even do the oversized footer thing that's quite popular these days...

[tresf]

It will also be quite redundant with our community tab, so we can consider making an include w/ a switch to change style as well?

[Sti2nd]

I agree on that you can hide those buttons if you want.

[lukas-w]

I suggest removing the links from the community dropdown. I also think they're evil, a regular menu item (assumingly part of the sitemap) should not link to external sites. I was surprised by that a lot when I first clicked it.

Do you want to try making the lame colored-labeled ones or keep them plain?

I vote for plain, color makes them more important than they really are ;)

We could even do the oversized footer thing that's quite popular these days...

As long as we have enough content to fill such a giant footer, I'm not opposed to the idea.

[Umcaruje]

I have been playing around a bit and this is how I imagine the buttons:

If you like the idea, I could make a pull request.

[tresf]

That is cool! How do the numbers get updated?

[Umcaruje]

Well I used mdo's Github buttons and Facebook's official like button, so they get updated whenever there's a new like or star. I would have put a count to the G+ button too, but its too wide compared to the others when I do so.

[tresf]

Hmmmm... Yeah we use thier API with credentials as to not exceed the daily
usage limits and that example seems like a quick hack someone created.

If I'm reading it correctly, his solution uses JavaScript to read the JSON
data on each page refresh.

Our approach uses PHP to read cached JSON data from the local web server
which refreshes every 15 minutes.

So if my assumptions are correct, his solution could break quickly on a
high traffic site like ours.

Furthermore, we have those bootstrap styles already in bootstrap.min.js so
perhaps an approach which mimics his but doesn't bombard the GitHub servers
would he the best of two evils.

I haven't ported any of the existing JSON feeds to to JS yet, and we make
our feeds private so JS can't read them either so we'll have to shim
something into json_common.php to get the same results.

Currently the feed updates block the page load so I've removed them from
the front page. If we crontab these feeds (again not implemented) and
sanitize and expose them publicly via PHP, then I think we would have an
ideal scenario.

[tresf]

So short answer, if we do this let's roll our own. :)

[lukas-w]

Please don't ever use facebook's like button on our official website! There are major privacy issues with it (it violates privacy laws in Germany and Canada for instance). Here are some links about it.

So if my assumptions are correct, his solution could break quickly on a
high traffic site like ours.

As the mdo's buttons use Javascript, the queries are sent from each visitor's browser/computer, so this wouldn't break anything for users except for those who visit our sites a hundred times per second, correct?

Nevertheless, I have been playing around with this as well a week ago. But because of the facebook privacy issues and because I didn't like the iframe way mdo's GitHub buttons work, I decided to just include boring links instead of buttons.

So I agree, if we're going to make buttons, we should make our own ;)

[tresf]

On Aug 16, 2014 1:02 PM, "Lukas W" notifications@github.com wrote:

Please don't ever use facebook's like button on our official website!
There are major privacy issues with it (it violates privacy laws in Germany
and Canada for instance). Here are some links about it.

Thx for the info.

As the mdo's buttons use Javascript, the queries are sent from each
visitor's browser/computer, so this wouldn't break anything for users
except for those who visit our sites a hundred times per second, correct?

Ah good point. In my testing 10 in a minute can trigger this (all services
seem to intentionally leave rate limits secret) but good points nonetheless.

[lukas-w]

If 10 in a minute are enough to reach the limit we should indeed roll our own. ;)

[Umcaruje]

You guys have really valid points. I never knew that about the facebook button. Interesting.
Well, looks like the best way is that we make our own buttons.

[tresf]

We have a verified site via Google+. Closing.