Shariff – Give Social Media Buttons Some Privacy

Shariff enables website users to share their favorite content without compromising their privacy. Demo

Facebook, Google+ and Twitter supply official sharing code snippets which quietly siphon personal data from all page visitors. Shariff enables visitors to see how popular your page is on Facebook and share your content with others without needless data leaks.

Shariff (/ˈʃɛɹɪf/) is an open-source, low-maintenance, high-privacy solution maintained by German computer magazine c't and heise online.

Shariff consists of two parts: a simple JavaScript client library and an optional server-side component. The latter fetches the number of likes, tweets and plus-ones. Share buttons and share counts work without a connection between your visitors' browsers and social networks (unless they decide to share, of course).

Getting Started

Download the latest release
Include CSS in <head>:
- build/shariff.complete.css contains all dependencies
- if Font Awesome is already included in your site, use build/shariff.min.css
Include JavaScript right before </body>:
- build/shariff.complete.js contains all dependencies
- if jQuery is already included in your site, use build/shariff.min.js
Insert one or more <div class="shariff"> elements.
Customize the look using data-* attributes.

To enable the counters in the buttons, see section Backends.

Usage example:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <link href="/path/to/shariff.min.css" rel="stylesheet">
</head>
<body>
    <h1>My article</h1>
    <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit.</p>

    <h2>Minimum buttons:</h2>
    <div class="shariff"></div>

    <h2>More advanced buttons:</h2>
    <div class="shariff" data-backend-url="/path/to/backend" data-url="http://www.example.com/my-article.html" data-theme="grey" data-orientation="vertical"></div>

    <!-- immediately before </body> -->
    <script src="/path/to/shariff.min.js"></script>
</body>
</html>

Getting Started using `npm`

You can also use Shariff's node package by installing it via npm:

$ cd my-project
$ npm install shariff --save

Edit your JS main script, include Shariff and initialize it in one or more containers:

// my-app.js
var Shariff = require('shariff');
var $ = require('jquery');
var buttonsContainer = $('.some-selector');
new Shariff(buttonsContainer, {
    orientation: 'vertical'
});

Running demo site

After downloading Shariff, install its dependencies by running npm install.

$ git clone https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff.git
$ cd shariff
$ npm install
$ grunt demo

Make sure you have installed the Grunt CLI. Run grunt demo to start a local web server which displays several button configurations. The demo page uses shariff-backend-node to request and display share counts.

Options (data attributes)

Attribute	Description	Default
`data-backend-url`	The path to your Shariff backend, see below. Settings the value to `null` disables the backend feature. No counts will occur.	`null`
`data-flattr-category`	Category to be used for Flattr.	`null`
`data-flattr-user`	User that receives Flattr donation.	`null`
`data-lang`	The localisation to use. Available: `bg`, `de`, `en`, `es`, `fi`, `hr`, `hu`, `ja`, `ko`, `no`, `pl`, `pt`, `ro`, `ru`, `sk`, `sl`, `sr`, `sv`, `tr`, `zh`	`de`
`data-mail-body`	If a `mailto:` link is used in `data-mail-url`, then this value is used as the mail body. The body text should contain the placeholder `{url}` which will be replaced with the share URL.	see `data-url`
`data-mail-subject`	If a `mailto:` link is used in `data-mail-url`, then this value is used as the mail subject.	see `data-title`
`data-mail-url`	The url target used for the `mail` service button	`?view=mail`
`data-media-url`	Media url to be shared (pinterest)	`null`
`data-orientation`	`vertical` will stack the buttons vertically.	`horizontal`
`data-referrer-track`	A string that will be appended to the share url. Can be disabled using `null`.	`null`
`data-services`	An entity-encoded JSON string containing an array of service names to be enabled. Example: `data-services="["facebook","googleplus"]"` Available service names: `twitter`, `facebook`, `googleplus`, `linkedin`, `pinterest`, `xing`, `whatsapp`, `mail`, `info`, `addthis`, `tumblr`, `flattr`, `diaspora`, `reddit`, `stumbleupon`, `threema`, `weibo`, `tencent-weibo`, `qzone`, `print`	`twitter`, `facebook`, `googleplus`, `info`
`data-theme`	We include 3 color schemes, `standard`, `grey` and `white`.	`standard`
`data-title`	Title to be used as share text in Twitter/Whatsapp	page's `DC.title`/`DC.creator` or `<title>`
`data-twitter-via`	Screen name of the user to attribute the Tweet to	`null`
`data-url`	The canonical URL of the page to check.	page's canonical URL or `og:url` or current URL

Constructor arguments

All data attributes above are also available as constructor arguments in JavaScript. However, the leading data- is omitted and the name is in camelCase instead of kebab-case:

var buttonsContainer = $('.some-selector');
new Shariff(buttonsContainer, {
    backendUrl: '/my/backend/url',
    orientation: 'vertical',
    mailUrl: 'mailto:me@example.com',
});

Supported browsers

Shariff supports the following Browsers:

Firefox
Google Chrome
Internet Explorer/Edge
Safari

The current and previous major releases of Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer/Edge and Safari are supported on a rolling basis.

Supported services

Shariff supports the following social sharing services:

AddThis
diaspora*
facebook
Flattr
Google+
LinkedIn
Mail
Pinterest
Print
Qzone
reddit
StumbleUpon
Tencent Weibo
Threema
Tumblr
Twitter
Weibo
WhatsApp
XING

Backends

In order to display share counts with Shariff, you need one of the following backends:

Third-party backends:

shariff-backend-java

Once you have one of these backends up and running, insert its URL into the data-backend-url attribute. For example, if the backend runs under http://example.com/my-shariff-backend/, the data-backend-url should be /my-shariff-backend/. The script will handle the rest.

Third-party integrations

This is a list of integrations for third-party systems:

Omegatcu/shariff