Social Shares

Social shares is intended to easily check social sharings of an url.

You can track how many times the url was shared in various social networks, such as facebook, twitter, etc. It can be useful for some kind landings with social mechanics or for tracking network activity of your content pages.

Supported networks

International:

• facebook
• google plus
• twitter Looking for another way, because API have been closed officially
• reddit
• linkedin
• pinterest
• stumbleupon
• buffer

Russian:

• vkontakte
• mail.ru(aka moi mir)
• odnoklassniki
• yandex (currently on beta, most of time returns 0)

Chinese:

• weibo

Basic usage

:000 > require 'social_shares'
 => true

:000 > url = 'http://www.apple.com/'
 => "http://www.apple.com/"

:000 > SocialShares.facebook url
 => 394927

:000 > SocialShares.google url
 => 28289

:000 > SocialShares.twitter url
 => 1164675

In case of exception:

:000 > SocialShares.twitter url
 => nil

:000 > SocialShares.twitter! url
  => RestClient::RequestTimeout: Request Timeout

Advanced usage

List of all supported networks:

:000 > SocialShares.supported_networks
 => [:vkontakte, :facebook, :google, :twitter, :mail_ru, :odnoklassniki, :reddit, :linkedin, :pinterest, :stumbleupon, :buffer]

Fetch all shares by one method (#all, #all!):

# in case of exception it will return nil
:000 > SocialShares.all url
 => {:vkontakte=>nil, :facebook=>399027, :google=>28346, :twitter=>1836, :mail_ru=>37, :odnoklassniki=>1, :reddit=>2361, :linkedin=>33, :pinterest=>21011, :stumbleupon=>43035, :weibo=>12760, :buffer=>1662, :yandex=>0}

# and this will raise it
:000 > SocialShares.all! url
 => RestClient::RequestTimeout: Request Timeout

Fetch shares by excluding networks(#omit, #omit!):

:000 > SocialShares.omit url, %w(facebook)
 => { :google=>28289, :linkedin=>nil, ... }

# same here
:000 > SocialShares.omit! url, %w(facebook)
 => RestClient::RequestTimeout: Request Timeout

Fetch shares of selected networks(#selected, #selected!):

:000 > SocialShares.selected url, %w(facebook google linkedin)
 => {:facebook=>394927, :google=>28289, :linkedin=>nil}

# same here
:000 > SocialShares.selected! url, %w(facebook google linkedin)
 => RestClient::RequestTimeout: Request Timeout

Total sum of sharings in selected networks:

:000 > SocialShares.total url, %w(facebook google)
 => 423216

# Second arg is optional, by default it takes all networks
:000 > SocialShares.total url
 => 1631102

Does any network have at least one link?

:000 > SocialShares.has_any? url, %w(facebook google)
 => true
# Second arg is optional, by default it takes all networks
:000 > SocialShares.has_any? url
 => true

Note that #has_any? is faster than (#total > 0), because it stops on first network that has at least 1 sharing

Caching

The gem uses Rails.cache for caching. If you don't define any cache_store then rails will use the file_store by default and store the counts into the tmp directory.

Here are some examples of configuration needed for caching with other serives than file_store:

Redis:

# Gemfile
gem 'redis-rails'

# config/initializers/redis_store.rb
redis_url = ENV["REDISCLOUD_URL"] || "redis://127.0.0.1:6379/0/social_shares"
SocialShares::Application.config.cache_store = :redis_store, redis_url, { expires_in: 5.minutes }

Memcached:

# Gemfile
gem 'dalli'
gem 'memcachier'

# config/environments/production.rb
config.cache_store = :dalli_store, { expires_in: 5.minutes }

Try it by yourself before installation

Send request through shell to test numbers. Please do NOT use this url in your projects.

curl -X POST -d '{"url": "http://www.apple.com", "networks": ["facebook", "google", "reddit"]}' https://social-shares-api-cedar-14.herokuapp.com/

You will see:

{"facebook":312412,"google":46088,"reddit":114}

Installation

Include the gem in your Gemfile:

gem 'social_shares'

Contributing

• Create provider class in lib/social_shares/foo.rb with method #shares!, that return Integer value. #checked_url is accessed attribute.

module SocialShares
  class Foo < Base
    def shares!
      response = RestClient.get(url)
      JSON.parse(response)["shares"] || 0
    end

  private

    def url
      "http://foo.com/?url=#{checked_url}"
    end
  end
end

• Add it to lib/social_shares.rb

require 'social_shares/foo'
SUPPORTED_NETWORKS = [:foo, :vkontakte, :facebook]

• Update README: add link to list, possible answer in #all method, etc.

Author

• Timur Kozmenko - [email protected]

Contributors

• Hamed Ramezanian
• Ciocanel Razvan
• Mehdi FARSI