How does SEOMoz Code its Social Badge on Blog

[Heydarian]

On the blog section (and most other pages of the site) there is a social badge on the right hand side of the page where it shows the number of followers on Twitter, FB fans, etc.

How does SEOMoz pull those numbers? It seems like its not using the normal Javascritps supplied by FB and Twitter, Feedburner.

Thanks

[KaneJamison]

Those numbers show up in the HTML, so they're likely calculated server-side in some way.

Feedburner (RSS feed provider), Twitter, and Facebook all have an API of some sort to grab the content from. Moz appears to use bronto.com to deliver their Top 10 email, so that's probably where they're getting the email subscriber count from.

Here's a tutorial to get you started on pulling content from Facebook/Twitter/Feedburner. Since it appears that your personal website uses Wordpress, I'll use that as a reference:

http://www.problogdesign.com/wordpress/how-to-get-facebook-twitter-and-rss-counts-wp/

[caseyhen]

We pull the numbers via javascript. If you check out posts.js when you are on the blog you can see where we make a call to Facebook and to Twitter to get those numbers. We also have hard coded the numbers at specific dates just in case it fails so there is a number present.

For the feedburner numbers we do those server side and ping the feedburner api and cache it. So there is one unlucky sole every hour that has to ping feedburner to recache the number.

[Heydarian]

Thank you guys. This was great. I'm definitely going to roll it out to all my sites.