Adding sharing buttons for all your blogger posts

The layout I’ll show in this blog post includes sites that are related to software development, but this can be easily be modified by removing them or replacing them with other services appropriate to the specific particular blog.

Open your blogger dashboard and select the design option for your blog. Use the Download Full Template option in Edit HTML to save a copy of your current template. This is important to make sure you can go back to your current template if anything goes wrong.

In the Edit Template section select Expand Widget Templates. Search for post-footer-line in the textbox that contains your template. These corresponds to the lines with the built-in blogger sharing options and labels. I used post-footer-line-3 (was empty) and added another one (post-footer-line-4).

Following the html to share on DZone, DotNetShoutout, DotNetKicks, Hacker News, Digg, Reddit, Google Buzz and Yahoo Buzz:

<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'>
	<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
	 <span style='top: 5px; position:relative; '>
		 <script type='text/javascript'> 
			var dzone_url = '<data:post.url/>';
			var dzone_title = '<data:post.title/>'; 
			var dzone_style = '2'; 
		 </script>
		 <script language='javascript' src='http://widgets.dzone.com/links/widgets/zoneit.js'/>
	 </span>
	 <a expr:href='&quot;http://dotnetshoutout.com/Submit?url=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title' expr:id='data:widget.instanceId + &quot;_shoutit&quot;' rel='nofollow' rev='vote-for'> <img alt='Shout it' expr:src='&quot;http://dotnetshoutout.com/image.axd?url=&quot; + data:post.url' style='border:0px; top: 2px; position:relative;'/></a>
	 <a expr:href='&quot;http://www.dotnetkicks.com/submit/?url=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title' expr:id='data:widget.instanceId + &quot;_kickit&quot;' rel='nofollow'><img alt='Submit this story to DotNetKicks' expr:src='&quot;http://www.dotnetkicks.com/Services/Images/KickItImageGenerator.ashx?url=&quot; + data:post.url'/></a>
		<a expr:href='&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;t=&quot; + data:post.title' rel='nofollow'><img src='http://ycombinator.com/images/y18.gif' title='Submit to Hacker News'/></a>
	</b:if>
</div>
<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-4'>
	<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
		<script type='text/javascript'>
			(function() {
			var s = document.createElement('SCRIPT'), s1 = document.getElementsByTagName('SCRIPT')[0];
			s.type = 'text/javascript';
			s.async = true;
			s.src = 'http://widgets.digg.com/buttons.js';
			s1.parentNode.insertBefore(s, s1);
			})();
		</script>
		<span style='top: 7px; position:relative; margin-right: 5px;'>
			<a class='DiggThisButton DiggCompact'/>
		</span>
		<script>
			reddit_url='<data:post.url/>';
			reddit_title='<data:post.title/>';
		</script>
		<span style='top: 10px; position:relative; margin-right: 5px;'>
			<script language='javascript' src='http://reddit.com/button.js?t=1'/>
		</span>
		<a class='google-buzz-button' data-button-style='small-count' href='http://www.google.com/buzz/post' rel='nofollow' title='Post to Google Buzz'/>
		<script src='http://www.google.com/buzz/api/button.js' type='text/javascript'/>
		<script type='text/javascript'>
			yahooBuzzArticleHeadline = '<data:post.title/>';
			yahooBuzzArticleSummary = '<data:post.title/>';
			yahooBuzzArticleCategory = 'science';
			yahooBuzzArticleType = 'text';
			yahooBuzzArticleId = <data:post.url/>;
		</script>
		<span style='display: inline-block;'>
			<script badgetype='text-votes' src='http://d.yimg.com/ds/badge2.js' type='text/javascript'/>
		</span>
	</b:if>
</div>

Special blogger if at lines 2 and 17 make sure we only display the various share options on the actual post pages. Some of the share code above uses the current page’s URL, so if we wanted to share options in the list of blog posts in the home page of the blog we would need to use alternate sharing code and move the general script files to the blog template.

Spans with relative positioning at lines 3, 27, 34 were added to align the corresponding share buttons.

The span at line 46 makes sure the Yahoo Buzz button code is contained in a block element. This fixes an issue on IE, where the image shows way above the rest of the text.

The line 42 sets the Yahoo Buzz category to science, you might want to use a different category.

Below some blog posts used as referenced for some of the share code:

• DotNetKicks Blogger integration that actually works!
  
• Add Dotnetshoutout button in all blog posts blogger blogs

Preventing double submit on multi button forms with jquery

Note that this is just a fast feedback mechanism, it shouldn't replace server side logic to prevent double submits. This is specially true if the operations can’t be easily reverted or there would be associated costs to reversing the operation.

With that out of the way, lets get right to the code:

   1: $(document).ready(function () {

   2:     $('form').submit(function (e) {

   3:         var theForm = $(this);

   4:         var isValid = doSomeFormValidations(theForm);

   5:         if (!isValid) return false;

   6:         setTimeout(function () {

   7:             var btn = theForm.find('input[type="submit"]');

   8:             btn.attr('disabled', 'disabled');

   9:             btn.val('Processing');

  10:          }, 10);

  11:         return true;

  12:     });

  13: });

Replace doSomeFormValidations with your own logic and you are good to go. There are other alternatives you might already be using, like having the button disabled until all validations passes. The important bit there is to make sure it’ll only disable the buttons if all validations passed.

Now lets go over some pieces and why those are relevant to it working with multi button forms.

• return true/false in the submit body: true moves forward with the submit, while false cancels it. 
  
  
  • An alternative to this is returning false, unbinding our submit function and explicitly calling theForm.submit(). While this seems to work in the multiple button scenario, we are playing with fire here. We are relying on jquery or the underlying browser events/functions to send that last clicked button’s value. This is an implicit assumption we would be making, and it's usually based on works on my machine.
  
  
• Disabling the submit buttons & adding a processing message for the user: 
  
  
  • No delay: has the undesired side effect that the button’s value isn't sent with the request in some browsers. Additionally it can even prevent the submit if it were disabled on the button’s click instead of the form’s submit. This is not totally unexpected as we are disabling the button. In fact, disabling any other input element (textboxes, select, etc.) can cause that data not to be sent to the server just like with our selected button’s value. 
  • Delay: By adding an insignificant delay, we let the rest of the submit behavior do its thing, so all the values in the form are sent in the request, including the selected button’s value. After those values are grabbed by the submit, we can disable controls and change values without affecting what will be sent to the server.
  
  
• Don’t call use an id/name of ‘submit’ in your buttons. While not shown in the above code, this is important as it could cause conflicts with the submit events.

I want to stress out what I just mentioned in the no delay bullet. Just disabling any input of the form right away, will prevent the value from being sent to the server in some browsers.

This can easily get you into a situation where you can't figure out why the button pressed isn't being sent to the server, specially if you are working on an already built third party site. So if you are missing any input, first use a developer tool to inspect the elements and then go through the scripts, it's very likely somewhere in there.

You can tweak the above function to fit your needs, like display a different message, hide part of the UI, take actions if it'll timeout.