This document is intended for developers who want to write applications that can interact with the Spreadly Button API

Developer Documentation

Getting Started

The Spread.ly button is a tool to share content in several social networks simultanously. This content can also be deals of many sorts that give incentives to the user for liking an item. You can use the Spread.ly button API to customize many aspects of the sharing experience for your users.

Mandatory Parameters

Mandatory parameters are the minimum requirement for the button to work. You should set them programmatically for your software (cms, blog or online shop software) - otherwise you would need to configure each button manually for every separate page (url).

Example:

iFrame:

<iframe src="http://button.spread.ly/?url={url}&social={1|0}" 
        style="overflow:hidden; width: 420px; height: 30px; padding: 0px 0;"
        frameborder="0"
        scrolling="no"
        marginheight="0"
        allowTransparency="true">
</iframe>

link:

<a href="http://spread.ly/?url={url}" 
   target="_blank"
   rel="like">
  <img src="http://spreadly.com/img/staticbutton.png"
       alt="Like"
  />
</a>

Optional Parameters

Optional parameters can enhance the user experience decidedly, by giving you more control over how your shared content will look like. If you don't define these parameters, the Spread.ly crawler software will visit your page and will try to determine the most relevant content programmatically.

Example:

iFrame:

<iframe src="http://button.spread.ly/?url={url}&social={1|0}&title={title}&description={description}&photo={photo-url}&tags={tag,tag}&label={like}&color={973765}" 
        style="overflow:hidden; width: 420px; height: 30px; padding: 0px 0;"
        frameborder="0"
        scrolling="no"
        marginheight="0"
        allowTransparency="true">
</iframe>

link:

<a href="http://button.spread.ly/?url={url}&title={title}&description={description}&photo={photo-url}&tags={tag,tag}&color={973765}" 
   target="_blank"
   rel="like">
  <img src="http://spreadly.com/img/staticbutton.png"
       alt="Like"
  />
</a>

Other Restrictions

• Maximum length for the iframe URL including all parameter settings is 2000 characters.
• At this time there is no usage limitation concerning the number of requests.

Full Example

A complete example how a share button/link could look like. Sample page: http://spreadly.com

url	http://spreadly.com/
social	1
title	Spread.ly
description	first choice for social sharing
photo
tags	like,deal,spread,share
color	973765
label	share

iFrame:

<iframe src="http://button.spread.ly/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fspreadly.com%2F&social=1&title=Spread.ly&description=first%20choice%20for%20social%20sharing&photo=http%3A%2F%2Fspreadly.com%2Fimg%2Fspreadlyicon.jpg&tags=like%2Cdeal%2Cspread%2Cshare&color=973765&label=share" 
        style="overflow:hidden; width: 420px; height: 60px; padding: 0px 0;"
        frameborder="0"
        scrolling="no"
        marginheight="0"
        allowTransparency="true">
</iframe>

link:

<a href="http://button.spread.ly/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fspreadly.com%2F&title=Spread.ly&description=first%20choice%20for%20social%20sharing&photo=http%3A%2F%2Fspreadly.com%2Fimg%2Fspreadlyicon.jpg&tags=like%2Cdeal%2Cspread%2Cshare&color=973765" 
   target="_blank"
   rel="like">
  <img src="http://spreadly.com/img/staticbutton.png"
       alt="Like"
  />
</a>