Add a retweet button to your Rails app easily with the Backtweets helper
On this blog, I use the excellent Socialize plugin to easily add social sharing buttons to each post. For Twitter, I chose to configure Socialize to use Backtweets for displaying tweet counts mainly because it's more configurable than the TweetMeme widget.
When I needed a Backtweets widget for a client Rails application, I whipped up a quick plugin that provides an easy helper for writing all those JavaScript options.
Installation
You can install the plugin from the GitHub repo:
script/plugin install git://github.com/pengwynn/backtweets_helper.git
Displaying a tweet count in your view
To display a count of tweets that reference the current page, simply call the helper:
<%= backtweets_count %> <%= backtweets_count(:size => :small) %>
The full set of options include:
| Parameter | Default value | Description |
|---|---|---|
url |
Current URL | The URL to measure tweets for |
title |
Title of the current page | The title of the page for retweets |
src |
Leading text for retweets | |
via |
true |
If tweets contain '(via @BackType)' |
links |
false |
If links should be opened in new windows |
size |
large |
Size of button (large or small) |
api_key |
Awe.sm API Key for custom URL shortener | |
short_url |
Generated (bt.io) | Specify the pre-shortened URL that you would like to use |
background |
Button background color (e.g. FFFFFF) |
|
border |
Button border color (e.g. CCCCCC) |
|
text |
Button text color (e.g. 000000) |
Displaying recent comments, blogroll and search
The plugin also includes three other helpers to render user comments and blogroll widgets as well as a comment search widget:
<%= backtweets_comments('pengwynn') -%> <%= backtweets_blogroll('pengwynn') -%> <%= backtweets_search('ruby') -%>
If you would like to hit the Backtweets API for more info on your links and counts, check out the Twitterland gem.