✨ social-url

A simple gem to generate social media sharing URLs.

Supported networks: Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and mailto:.

Introduction

This gem was created to help you create social media sharing URLs. Create a message once and make it sharable on multiple networks with each their own specific parameters.

Use this to create fast sharing links as opposed to performance-heavy third-party sharing widgets.

Read more about Responsible Social Share Links (by @jonsuh).

Usage

Setup a new message to share on social networks using the Message class:

message = SocialUrl::Message.new({
  text: 'Hello World',
  url: 'http://example.com',
  hashtags: %w(nature sunset)
})

Use the message's network methods to get the sharing URLs:

• facebook_url
• google_url
• mailto_url
• pinterest_url
• twitter_url

message.twitter_url #=> 'https://twitter.com/intent/tweet/?text=Hello%20World&url=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com&hashtags=nature,sunset'
message.facebook_url #=> 'https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com'
...

Parameters

This gem translates the options passed to the SocialUrl::Message into the correct parameters for each network. Supported options are:

Network	Supported parameters
Facebook	url (String)
Google	url (String)
mailto	url (String) text (String)
Pinterest	url (String) text (String) media (String)
Twitter	url (String) text (String) hashtags (Array of Strings) via (String) related (Array of Strings)

Utilities

The SocialUrl class provides normalization functionality for URL parameters and exposes the available networks:

SocialUrl.networks #=> [:facebook, :google, :twitter, ...]

SocialUrl.normalize_string('Hello World') #=> 'Hello%20World'
SocialUrl.normalize_array(%w(nature sunset)) #=> 'nature,sunset'
SocialUrl.normalize_array(['twitter:Twitter News', 'twitterapi:Twitter API News']) #=> 'twitter%3ATwitter%20News,twitterapi%3ATwitter%20API%20News'

Installation

This library is test with the following Rubies: 2.3.8, 2.4.5, 2.5.3.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'social-url'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install social-url

Contributing

I'm happy to accept any pull requests for new networks. Adding a new network is relatively easy. Say you'd want to add mynetwork support:

1. Create lib/social_url/networks/mynetwork.rb and test/lib/social_url/networks/mynetwork_test.rb
2. Add tests and implementation (take a look at the current networks)

License

This library is released under the MIT License.