After looking at the Social plugins like Sociable, Sharethis, and Shareaholic and seeing some great reviews but also some very bad reviews. Some reviews saying the plugin was also data mining their site. I decided to write some code to easily add these social media icons. My client was using Sharethis but on just a static HTML website (which I’m moving to WordPress). Sharethis has all the other icons built into it.
I debated creating a plugin, but since this was so little code, I just created the following and added it to the functions.php file for my theme. Now on any page or post, I just add the shortcode to it.
");
}
?>
To add more social outlets you can go to the sharethis website to get the code to add it. Typlically, it would just be adding another span element to the mytheme_sharethis function.
Of course, does this actually prevent any data mining? If it occurs via the JavaScript that sharethis adds (and it adds javascript for each of the other outlets you use), then probably not. It prevents data mining from the plugin developer though.
