, shows web content acquired for preservation by The National Archives. External links, forms and search may not work in archived websites and contact details are likely to be out of date.
The UK Government Web Archive does not use cookies but some may be left in your browser from archived websites.
While we take great lengths to provide AddThis with top notch performance, we have a couple suggestions for anyone who wants to take extra measures to ensure the best page load time.
Asynchronous Loading
Normally, AddThis executes initialization code as soon as it arrives on the page. While we strive to make this as efficient as possible, load times of more important resources can be affected. To optimize load time, AddThis can be loaded asynchronously, such that no assets are loaded and only the most essential processing occurs. To read how to load AddThis asyncronously, check out our docs here.
Loading Without CSS
If desired, you can prevent our CSS from loading during the initialization sequence, allowing you to completely override our CSS without incurring the cost of an additional load. Go here to grab the code for loading without CSS.
We are always monitoring and improving the performance of AddThis, but please never hesitate to reach out to us (via forum or email) if you are noticing any sort of lag. It is a priority for us to make sure you are getting a smooth and seamless integration of our tool.
If you are a user of old versions of the AddThis plugin for Blogger or WordPress, next week, on April 26th, we will be turning on click back tracking in our AddThis sharing tool. This feature will give you awesome insight into how viral your content is. You may have a few questions about click back tracking so below we have some answers to common questions about click back tracking.
- What is click back tracking?
Click back tracking allows AddThis to know when someone clicks on a shared link. When this is turned on, you will see how many clicks occurred from each share, and the viral lift you get from when someone shares your content. You will be able to see the new analytics here next week. If you want more details on how we do click back tracking check out this post.
- Will I have to upgrade my AddThis plugin to get click back tracking?
No, we will be able to push this change automatically, all you have to do is sit back and start watching your analytics. If you want to turn off click back tracking you will have to update to the latest AddThis plugin for either Blogger or WordPress.
- What happens if I want to turn off click back tracking?
We understand some users may not want this feature, and we will still give users a way to disable click back tracking. If you are a WordPress user make sure you have installed the latest version, 2.0.6 or greater, you can find the click back track preference under the AddThis settings’ Advanced tab. On Blogger, if you installed our gadget you can uncheck the box “Track Clickbacks” in the settings. For our Blogger widget you need to edit the code in the widget to include the addthis_config and set clickbacks to off.
As always feedback is appreciated via comments below.
We recently introduced our Content Feed API, which allows you to easily access RSS and JSON feeds of your top shared or clicked content. You can add these feeds to your site and widgets to encourage users to interact with your most interesting content!
We’ve now added a great tool for previewing what could be pulled into your content feed as well as an easy way to grab the code for displaying it on your site. Head over to the Content Feed API docs and check out the Configure Your Feed section (note: you must be logged into your AddThis account for this feature to work).
If you have more than one domain, choose the one you would like to configure. Then select the feed to display, a choice between Trending Content, Most Shared and Most Clicked. Finally, pick your time frame and then hit Generate Your Feed to see the preview populate! Below the preview, you’ll notice convenient code to grab as you please.
We strongly encourage you to implement a feed on your site using the Content Feed API. Displaying top content has proven to be a great way to recirculate traffic and keep users engaged, increasing their time spent on your site.
If you have any questions about implementing a content feed, please feel free to post in the comments, our technical support forum or email us. Also, if you’ve implemented anything on your site using our Content Feed API, we’d love to see it!
You may have noticed your Facebook Like buttons have a little something extra today: A scroll bar.
Turns out Facebook changed the way they’re displaying the Like button and since we just pass it along – with a little special sauce to capture them for our analytics – it’s causing a problem for our users.
Luckily, we’ve got a couple solutions for this until we can put out an official fix, which should be soon.
First, you can make sure you have Facebooks FBML namespace in your <html> tag. For example:
You might have other namespaces in the HTML tag. Just make sure everything it includes xmlns:fb=”http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml” before the greater-than sign.
Second, you can alter the code for the AddThis Facebook like button to specify the appropriate height by adding an fb:like:height attribute, like this:
As you may know, we’ve been working hard to leverage data from AddThis to enable advertisers and publishers, like you, to create better and more personalized experiences to acquire and retain users. For instance, our Audience Platform enables brands to power interest-based ads to users. Though we all believe personalization is the future, we also have a responsibility to balance a users desire for a more personal experience with their right to privacy.
Today at Clearspring, we have announced the first in a series of efforts to push forward on providing users with more notice and choice. First, we’re proud to announce that AddThis is now a member of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI). Second, we’ve enabled the Evidon Platform as an option within all online ads powered by data that we’ve collected through AddThis.
Being a member of the NAI means following strict privacy best practices, as well as becoming part of their universal opt-out tool. This tool enables users to easily opt-out from data collection from one, or more NAI members using simple point and click tools.
The Evidon platform further enables notice and choice. Users will now see a button within online ads that indicates the ad is powered by interest-based data. If the user wants to learn more about interest-based ads, or opt-out, they can simply click on that button and easily learn more or opt-out of data collection.
We’re really excited about participating in this ecosystem. Stay tuned. We’ll be continuing to roll out new features and controls to give end users the maximum amount of notice and choice about what’s happening with their data and privacy online.
We have the tips to help you get the most sharing and ultimately more traffic back to your site. Here at AddThis, we analyze and test different implementations, as well as provide you with personalized tools to help optimize each user’s experience.
First, make sure you have the latest version of AddThis and are registered for our analytics. Then follow this checklist:
Pick a prominent position. Under or next to an article title or page header.
Keep AddThis near the top of the page. OR double it up and provide another share button post-article. The lazy scroller ends up sharing!
Place sharing near the content being shared. If it’s a video, increase sharing by placing the share on the player using our widget sharing.
Don’t put sharing in the navigation. Not only is this mostly ineffective, it also is somewhat confusing. Is the user sharing only the page they are on or the whole website?
Use service icons. We always recommend our toolbox implementation, as it is personalized to show users their favorite services. Plus, the service icons provide quick sharing with less clicks.
Check out our Help section for many other tips and much more guidance on using AddThis. From set-up to using our analytics to get insights to your audience, we have all your social needs.
Hello, I’m Paul Rothrock, the new product support engineer at Clearspring. I’ll be helping Justin and Kori to make sure publishers and developers get the most out of the AddThis and its APIs.
Before I came to Clearspring I was a freelancer in my home town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I did a lot of work with small businesses and individuals to create web applications and personal sites. I’m excited to continue helping people use the great platform that AddThis has created.
The best place to see what’s on my mind is to follow @icelander on Twitter.
I’m sure I’ll be hearing from a lot of you, so if you have any questions feel free to contact me at paul@clearspring.com
We are humbled by another great milestone here at AddThis – our Firefox browser extension has surpassed 3 million downloads.
AddThis for Firefox was originally created at a Clearspring Hackathon and it has been a thrill to watch the success of this product. It goes to show how beneficial it is for end users to have that persistent one-click access to sharing regardless of where they are on the web.
Thanks again to a wonderful and supportive community. Your honest feedback has helped shape this product – a product that proves its great function through the numbers.
We wanted to let you know that Avira, an antivirus software provider, has erroneously flagged one of the AddThis assets as containing a virus in a recent definition update. This may cause various antivirus products that rely on these definitions to report a virus originating from the AddThis assets. Specifically, the warning will refer to JS/Agent.agx
You can read more about the issue on Avira’s support forum. Rest assured that there is absolutely no virus being distributed through the AddThis toolset.
Clearspring was excited to be featured on Good Morning America this past weekend. The ABC crew stopped by last Friday and highlighted us as an example of a fast-growing company demonstrating the economic recovery.
Since 2008, Clearspring has extended the reach of AddThis from 200MM unique users monthly to over 1B. And with our new Audience Platform, revenue is growing just as fast. It’s been quite a ride!
Want to join the fun? Check out our Careers page and submit your resume. We’d love to hear from you.
