Share

I was working on adding a Facebook Share button to blog posts at work and I couldn't seem to get it to display the speech bubble with the number of shares without clicking on the icon.

I did a whole bunch of searching and it turned out that it was caused by some Javascript from Facebook that only displays the count if it's more than 3. I don't really like the inconsistency of that, so I looked for a way to get it displayed even if it's zero. A guy named Patrick Kelly suggests getting your own local copy of the Facebook Javascript (FB.Share) and modifying the displayBox() function call so it shows any number. This is fine for now in that it will work, but as Patrick points out on his blog, it will potentially break if Facebook update their API, or make other changes to the underlying code.

I decided to pick apart the code and come up with a solution that doesn't involve the same issues. The fix is fairly basic. You just need to include the share button in the same way as Facebook tells you, and then insert the following Javascript after that:

<script type="text/javascript">
var buttons = document.getElementsByName('fb_share');
var count = buttons.length;
for(var i = 0; i<count; i++) {
  var data = FB.Share.getUrl(buttons[i]);
  if(FB.Share.results[data]) {
    buttons[i].fb_count = FB.Share.results[data].total_count;
  }
  FB.Share.displayBox(buttons[i], 0);
}
</script>

Hopefully that's a bit tidier than copying and editing the FB.Share file. It also means that you'll benefit from a cached version of the code being presented to the user if they've been on any other site with that button. A fairly tiny benefit, but every little helps.