Share Links With React Hooks

You may or may not have come across the idea of Responsible Share Links. From the article:

"Social share scripts are convenient and easy to copy & paste but rely on JavaScript and add additional overhead to your site, which means more HTTP requests and slower load times. Instead, use share links that don’t require you to load scripts for each social site."

Sounds good to me! I'm a big fan of implementing simple components myself anyway, rather than loading a million libraries. So I wrote a quick React component to add share links to the upcoming website overhaul of Spacepost.io.

  const [popup, setPopup] = useState({
    url: ""
  })

  function windowPopup(e) {
    let screenSize = getWindowDimensions();
    var width = screenSize.width/2;
    var height = screenSize.height/2;
      e.preventDefault();
      console.log(e.currentTarget.getAttribute('href'))
      var url = e.currentTarget.getAttribute('href')
      setPopup(url)
    
      var left = (screenSize.width / 2) - (width / 2),
        top = (screenSize.height / 2) - (height / 2);  
      window.open(
        url,
        "",
        "menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,width=" + width + ",height=" + height + ",top=" + top + ",left=" + left
      );
  }

  function getWindowDimensions() {
    const { innerWidth: width, innerHeight: height } = window;
    return {
      width,
      height
    };
  }

Just bind to the click event of your link, and you're good to go. To construct the share URL from the page, I used the classic window workaround and passed that as props to my ShareLink component. I will also be adding the excerpt and possibly some other information as needed.

if (typeof window !== `undefined`) {
    shareURL = window.location.href;
  }

The workaround is because during build, broswer APIs like window aren't available. This will throw an error when trying to build/deploy, unless you account for that.

Pretty straightforward! There's probably a bunch of slick optimizations I can do, but this fits my needs quite nicely.

 Share Links

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