Another Site Speedup: Static Social Buttons

I've completed another site modification to speed up page loads. Our social sharing buttons are now all static. The buttons in the upper right were switched months ago. Just today, I completed implementation of a custom set of static share buttons for app pages, forum posts, etc. Now, instead of loading a heavy Javascript from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn on every page to show the like, share and tweet buttons, it's loading a set of static images that hook to a single Javascript function to handle popping up a window to the standard URL for each of those services. We lose the Facebook like button in the process, but it's pretty useless on websites these days.

So, downside is that we lose the Facebook like button and the share/like/tweet counts on pages. Upside is external Javascript from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Linked in have been eliminated which results in lighter weight pages, decreased rendering time, and increased privacy since your internet footprint while on PortableApps.com isn't shared with all those services. As before, the buttons won't work with Javascript disabled.

I'll probably type up a general announcement about this in the next few days, but wanted to post a quick note in the forum about it today just in case anyone experiences any issues.

As a bonus, we'll likely be packaging this up as its own Drupal module for others to use as well as a raw version on github for folks who roll their own sites and to encourage WordPress and other packages.

Hope you like the change!