In December 2012 I had removed all social network sharing buttons from my website and weblog, due to lack of use. During these last fourteen months, visitor counts have been growing briskly and referrer activity shows that some people actually occasionally come to this obscure domain from Twitter or Facebook.
Part of my decision to remove sharing buttons was that the pages on my main website are nicely static and script-free, except for Google Analytics and some minimal JavaScript code for responsive layout. But last summer I found an informative post by Guillermo Garron with passive sharing links for the three most important networks – Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. I was aware of the passive Twitter link but not of the other two. His links work well and have a tiny impact on page loading, so I decided to add them to the footer of my static pages.
On the weblog, I admit I couldn’t be bothered since Jetpack’s default integration of social networks is so convenient. So I simply added the equivalent three buttons back to the footer of each post and page. Let’s see if they get some use this time around…
2014-02-13: Couldn’t resist tinkering some more and added Disqus comments to the main website. That’s a whole lot of remote JavaScript but I hope the asynchronous loading and placement at the bottom of the page will minimize any distractions. I had originally intended for visitors to comment on the latest weblog entry for any given page, but few people ever seemed to discover that link. The Disqus block is hard to overlook!
2014-08-04: Six months later, it seems that nobody ever uses these buttons, even when an article is popular on a social network. So they’re now gone for good, on both weblog and website.