Custom social buttons with counters?

Question

How can I create custom social buttons (in particular, Post to Twitter, Facebook, Stumblepon, Reddit) - using counters. Buttons need the same consistent style as part of the design, and ideally we don’t want to use ready-made tags as such.

Creating custom buttons is easy - but custom counters I'm not sure about. How can this be achieved?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Answer 1

Several social sites provide API methods to get the number of stocks for a specific URL. Some of the API methods are internal and public.

• LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?url=http://news.ycombinator.com
• Facebook - http://graph.facebook.com/http://news.ycombinator.com

Twitter has removed its undocumentation endpoint.

• Twitter - http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://news.ycombinator.com

Answer 2

I'm not 100% sure about the Facebook API, but the Twitter API allows you to customize the style of the buttons. You can find it under the heading "Create your own Tweet button", which is located at the bottom of the next page:

https://dev.twitter.com/pages/tweet_button

Alternatively, you can use Javascript to grab the node button and attach the account data to your own buttons.