Comments on: Create Social Bookmarks with the AddThis API

By: Stephen McIntyre

Stephen McIntyre — Fri, 21 May 2010 18:02:45 +0000

The AddThis API only sends the URL you give it to the Facebook sharer, so the title and description in this case is not needed. The only way to change the title and description would be to change them on the individual pages themselves.

Hope this helps.

By: Espen Arnoy

Espen Arnoy — Fri, 21 May 2010 16:47:10 +0000

I have multiple items on a page which i want to allow users to share on facebook. How can i define a unique title and description for each of those items?

Thanks!

By: Compras Panama

Compras Panama — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:53:06 +0000

I Will have to come back again when my course load lets up – nevertheless I am taking your RSS feed so I can read your site offline. Thanks.

By: Stephen McIntyre

Stephen McIntyre — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:23:09 +0000

Apparently Facebook ignores the title sent to it and only accepts the URL as input. It then fetches all the data from the URL and uses that. You need to add a meta tag at the top of your page to tell Facebook what you want the title to be, like so: More info here: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Share/Specifying_Meta_Tags

By: Yuriy

Yuriy — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:54:44 +0000

Hi Stephen,
Thank you for a wonderful post. I was looking for something with this functionality for days now. I want to use Addthis, but preferably with different buttons, without javascript, plus I would like to be able to submit a different page and different title.
Unfortunately, I was not able to get my title carried to facebook. The title was always picked up by the page in the URL, not from the title in the URL.
For example, this URL
http://api.addthis.com/oexchange/0.8/forward/facebook/offer?url=http://stephenmcintyre.net&title=Stephen will still pick up your full name for the post, not just your last name.
Please kindly let me know if it is possible at all to override the name.
Thank you,
Yuriy

By: Charlie

Charlie — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:52:01 +0000

Hi DogDay,

I’m a developer at AddThis, we found an configuration issue on one one of our sharing servers last week that caused intermittent issues handling UTF-8 encoded characters. I’m really sorry for the inconvenience, we resolved it as soon as we discovered the problem. It should be fully working now, for example:

http://api.addthis.com/oexchange/0.8/forward/twitter/offer?url=http://addthis.com&title=a%20%C2%AB%20b

Please let me know if you have any further issues, you’re welcome to email me directly: charlie_clearspring.com (replace _ with @)

Charlie

By: DogDay

DogDay — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:38:23 +0000

Tested this morning all the options you told me to test. No way. I think it is a problem of the addthis API.

It has problems with the « character.

Sometimes its decoded correctly, sometimes is decoded as ‘AND LAQUO ;’ and sometimes is decoded malformed, with extrange characters.

Thanks anyway.

By: DogDay

DogDay — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:00:02 +0000

Thanks for the info. I will try to code what you suggest.

By: Stephen McIntyre

Stephen McIntyre — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:25:12 +0000

Blog title can be fetched through WordPress with bloginfo(‘name’).

When looking for the post title, it’s best to either use $post->post_title or get_the_title($post->ID) as it returns without changing any of your special characters.

Alternatively, you could use html_entity_decode and have something like html_entity_decode(the_title(), ENT_COMPAT, ‘UTF-8′)

Hope this helps. Thanks for your comment.

By: DogDay

DogDay — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:24:36 +0000

I have been waiting for this info. Here it is at last. I solved this with javascript, and last night just before reading this I figured out how to do the same, but usig PHP and the Wordpress templates.

The only problem I find is that I send the URL like this: BLOG TITLE « POST TITLE.

BLOG TITLE is not generated dinamically. POST TITLE is generated dinamically using the_title tag from wordpress.

And « is always malformed when is sent. Try it and tell me what do you think.

Thanks!