Share Post: A Plugin for Pelican

Share Post is a Pelican plugin that creates share links in articles that allow site visitors to share the current article with others in a privacy-friendly manner.

Many web sites have share widgets to let readers share posts on social networks. Most of these widgets are used by vendors for online tracking. These widgets can also be visually-distracting and negatively affect readers’ attention.

Share Post creates old-school URLs for some popular sites which your theme can use. These links do not have the ability to track site visitors. They can also be unobtrusive depending on how Pelican theme uses them.

Installation

This plugin can be installed via:

python -m pip install pelican-share-post

As long as you have not explicitly added a PLUGINS setting to your Pelican settings file, then the newly-installed plugin should be automatically detected and enabled. Otherwise, you must add share_post to your existing PLUGINS list. For more information, please see the How to Use Plugins documentation.

Usage

This plugin adds to each Pelican article a dictionary of URLs that, when followed, allows the reader to easily share the article via specific channels. When activated, the plugin adds the attribute share_post to each article with the following format:

article.share_post = {
	"email": "<URL>",
	"diaspora": "<URL>",
	"facebook": "<URL>",
	"hacker-news": "<URL>",
	"linkedin": "<URL>",
	"mastodon": "<URL>",
	"reddit": "<URL>",
	"twitter": "<URL>",
	"bluesky": "<URL>",
}

You can then access those variables in your template. For example:

{% if article.share_post and article.status != 'draft' %}
<section>
  <p id="post-share-links">
    Share on:
    <a href="{{article.share_post['email']}}" title="Share via Email">Email</a>
    ❄
    <a href="{{article.share_post['diaspora']}}" title="Share on Diaspora">Diaspora</a>
    ❄
    <a href="{{article.share_post['facebook']}}" title="Share on Facebook">Facebook</a>
    ❄
    <a href="{{article.share_post['hacker-news']}}" title="Share on Hacker News">Hacker News</a>
    ❄
    <a href="{{article.share_post['linkedin']}}" title="Share on LinkedIn">LinkedIn</a>
    ❄
    <a href="{{article.share_post['mastodon']}}" title="Share on Mastodon">Mastodon</a>
    ❄
    <a href="{{article.share_post['reddit']}}" title="Share via Reddit">Reddit</a>
    ❄
    <a href="{{article.share_post['twitter']}}" title="Share on Twitter">Twitter</a>
    ❄
    <a href="{{article.share_post['bluesky']}}" title="Share on Bluesky">Bluesky</a>
  </p>
</section>
{% endif %}

Contributing

Contributions are welcome and much appreciated. Every little bit helps. You can contribute by improving the documentation, adding missing features, and fixing bugs. You can also help out by reviewing and commenting on existing issues.

To start contributing to this plugin, review the Contributing to Pelican documentation, beginning with the Contributing Code section.

Contributors

• Talha Mansoor - talha131@gmail.com
• Jonathan DEKHTIAR - contact@jonathandekhtiar.eu
• Justin Mayer
• Leonardo Giordani
• Maurizio Paglia

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.