StockTwits contracted Alex Paley, Blake Embrey, Selby Walker, and Andrew Ha to propose implementation Share, Follow, Mention, and Message buttons as well as embeddable messages.
Embeddable messages were designed to allow bloggers and members of the media to easily embed StockTwits messages in their articles and posts and copy code from a StockTwits message to paste into their CMS.
The StockTwits buttons were designed to function similarly to the Facebook and Twitter buttons which are already widely used. These buttons will make media content more interactive and more deeply integrated with StockTwits.
- Lightweight: these embeddable widgets had to be extremly lightweight so no large libraries like jQuery, Underscore, etc. could be used.
- Browser Compatability: these widgets support all major browsers including
Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and >=IE7. Supporting IE7 was particularly
challenging provided its lack of support for common DOM selection techniques
(e.g.
findElementsByClassName()). - Resizing iFrames: we used easyXDM to accomplish this.
- Caching Share Pages: we cached how many times a page was shared to prevent unnecessary calls to StockTwits' API.
- Cross-Domain Post Requests in IE7: In order to support IE7, we POST to an iFrame in order to do cross-domain POST requests without the use of CORS.
Feel free to check out our proposed implementation here.