Share links without the trackers

Social share buttons are the cheapest feature on the web and one of the most expensive things you can do to your readers. The official widgets from the big platforms load third-party JavaScript on every page view, which means every visitor is reported to those platforms whether they share anything or not. Reading became the transaction.

When I built sharing into Windrow, my CMS, I wanted the feature without the surveillance.

Every share destination worth supporting accepts a plain URL. A share button can be an ordinary anchor tag: no script, no iframe, no pixel. Nothing loads from anyone until the reader deliberately clicks, and at that point sharing is exactly what they asked for.

Windrow ships share rows built this way: copy link, email, and the social platforms, each a plain anchor. The page carries zero third-party requests. Your readers are not the product of your share buttons.

The principle generalizes past sharing. Maps load on click, not on page load. Fonts are self-hosted. There is no analytics script a visitor never agreed to. The default posture is that a page should make requests to the site it came from and nowhere else, until the human driving the browser says otherwise.

None of this costs a feature. It costs a habit: asking, before every embed, who else gets told about this page view. Usually the answer is nobody needs to be, and the plain version is one anchor tag away.