Setting the Link on a ShareThis Widget

I'm continuing to work on Meme13, a site that packages together the last 13 sites to show up on the Techmeme Leaderboard so they can be sampled as a feed or web site. The site has attracted around 25 RSS subscribers in its first month.

I've added a ShareThis widget on each entry that makes it easy to share content from Meme13 on sites like De.licio.us, Digg and Facebook.

Normally, ShareThis links to the page the widget has been displayed on. That doesn't suit my purposes on Meme13, because I'm trying to promote the originators of the content. If someone reads the article about landing a startup job by Ryan Spoon on Meme13, the ShareThis widget should link to the article on Spoon's blog.

ShareThis has a JavaScript API that can be used to teach the widget new tricks. Here's the JavaScript code to set the widget's target link and display the widget:

<p><script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
SHARETHIS.addEntry({
title:'<TMPL_VAR title>',
url:'<TMPL_VAR link ESCAPE="HTML">',
}, {button:true} );
</script></p>

The <TMPL_VAR title> and <TMPL_VAR link ESCAPE="HTML"> tags are part of the template language used by Planet Planet, the software that publishes Meme13. Here's how the same thing could be done in PHP:

<p><script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
SHARETHIS.addEntry({
title:'<? echo $site_title; ?>',
url:'<? echo $site_link; ?>',
}, {button:true} );
</script></p>

Syndicated 2008-05-19 18:10:09 from Workbench