/shariff

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

Primary LanguageJavaScriptMIT LicenseMIT

Shariff – Give Social Media Buttons Some Privacy

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

Shariff Logo © 2015 Heise Medien

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

  1. Download the latest release
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. Insert one or more <div class="shariff"> elements.
  5. 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. 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="[&quot;facebook&quot;,&quot;googleplus&quot;]" Available service names: twitter, facebook, googleplus, linkedin, pinterest, xing, whatsapp, mail, info, addthis, tumblr, flattr, diaspora, reddit, stumbleupon, threema, weibo, tencent-weibo, qzone 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

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.

Backends

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

Third-party backends:

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: