Not all Social buttons are the same

Social sharing buttons are now a common feature on most websites.  Just take a look at the end of this article to see that AlbanyWeb is a regular participator in this trend.  It's a simple way to help bring your site to the attention of more visitors.  There's nothing better than a personal recommendation, and these buttons make it easy for your existing visitors to spread the word.

Choosing the best buttons

However, the code behind these clever little buttons can really affect your website efficiency.  On some websites, apparently simple buttons are created using multiple calls to external websites for each single button.  If you have quite a lot of buttons, that is a lot of calls.  Not only that, but fetching the icons from each individual social media site leads to inconsistent appearance.

At AlbanyWeb, we did a lot of shopping around for a good and flexible option for allowing social sharing on our websites, and we chose the solution offered by the Ridiculously Responsive Social Sharing Buttons (RRSSB) module.  The SVG icons offer crystal clear looks at all sizes with a minimal download size.  Some clever code means that the buttons adapt to the size of the available area, so they automatically look good on the full range of sizes from tiny phone and a huge desktop screen.

Further enhancements

After using the module for a few months, we had some ideas for making the buttons even better.  The existing developer had moved onto other projects, so we volunteered to take over as the official maintainer.  AlbanyWeb partner Adam has been gradually improving the module, and we are proud to announce a new version "RRSSB+".  We've kept much that was good and smoothed out some rough edges.

  • The buttons resize and wrap to a new line gracefully, regardless of how many buttons you choose to add.
  • The appearance and sizing is more consistent across the spectrum of sizes.

The new version is running on all our AlbanyWeb websites, and is available for other developers to use as well.  Drupal is free software, developed by the community of users, and we are keen to make our own contribution.

Try it yourself!  Click on one of the buttons at the bottom of this article to see how easy it is to share one of our webpages, or see some developer options on our RRSSB+ demo page.

Standard Features