Building UI for Sharing Content

On today’s internet, there are more social media and online publishing platforms than ever before. Traditionally, you would have a share button that opens a dialog that has a bunch of social media icons to click on.

CodeCook.live is a publishing platform. I want to explore how we might make a better user experience for sharing out content the user has created.

First up, I simplified the buttons on the user’s list of sessions. Now we have buttons for:

• Copy link (the most common way to share)
• Share button (to open the dialog we are about to build)
• Go Live (for starting a CodeCook live code session)

Do people actually like those auto-formatted sharing posts that get generated by these social media sharing components? I doubt it. Most of the time, people just want to copy the link and write their own sharing text rather than use some auto-generated corp speak. This also makes for a simpler UI rather than having 20 different brand logo buttons on there.

Beyond simply copying and pasting the url, I've decided on two additional use cases for sharing from my platform:

• Republishing on other publishing platforms (Medium, Hashnode, etc)
• Republishing on microblogging platforms (Twitter/X, Bluesky, Threads)