Small blog update - now with safe social network integration
A few days ago I have been told again that my blog lacks the 'Like' button. Since that has not been the first time that I received this request and I had a few spare hours yesterday I decided to give it a go.
But I didn't want to include the social networking buttons of the most common networks without further care. From other webpages I know that some 'Like' buttons add significantly to the load and display time of websites if they are not very multimedia intense. I consider my blog to exactly fall into that category and therefore I want to avoid to double page loading times just for adding some tiny icons. Furthermore, in the mist of the Snowden/NSA revealations, I do not want to the visits of my postings to be automatically tracked by a multitude of different companies all over the internet.
Granted, I use Google Analytics for tracking the visits to my blog and individual posts to find out which area draws the most interest and how much traffic in general is receiving at my blog, but I set the "anonymizeIp"-parameter in my tracking to disallow the storage of detailled visitor IP addresses for Analytics processing. Yeah, I know it's not 100% anonymous and you still have to trust Google to respect this setting independend of their promises, but for me that's the acceptable balance between cost and benefit.
Back to the social network integration. To value the visitors experience and proactively counter the NSAs tracking abilities I decided to use a 2-staged approach in my blog. This means to Like/Tweet/+1 one of my postings or see the number of tweets/+1's (doesn't currently work for FB) one has to "activate" the specific button with a single click in advance. If this activation is not performed, no data or request is sent to the respecting server/company.
In my blog I use the solution of the Heise publisher, 2 Klicks f�r mehr Datenschutz, which they provide free for usage on their project page. It took me some time to integrate it on my blog, mainly because the sourcecode which they provide is not compatible to recent versions of jQuery and already a bit out of sync with integration changes by the social network buttons. The version used on http://heise.de is more up to date but not yet reflected on its project pageI wrote a notice about that to the writers of the plugin but have only received an automatic reply so far. We'll see...
Nevertheless, the integration on my blog is finished so far and some other Javascript code has also received a small overhaul. The loading time of my pages shouldn't be too much affected, there is only a small visual inconsistency left. If you don't notice it, don't bother. Maybe I'll manage to fix it, otherwise not much harm is done, at least in my opinion.