Tynt Tracer.
A colleague on a mailing list noted odd behaviour on a website. She copied a few words from one page and then pasted. Additional text was appended to what she’d copied: it included a link back to the originating site.
There was no sign of this extra text in the original page — even in the HTML source.
When I went exploring for the cause of this odd behaviour I ended up at Tynt Tracer:
Q. What is Tynt Tracer? The short version…
A. Tracer does a couple of interesting things: it tracks user engagement on your site by tracking copy and paste activity and automatically adds a link back to your content when it is pasted somewhere else.
This is pretty clever, and handled by a single line of Javascript.
I copy a selection of text.
It works like this: I copy a selection of text from the web page, and when I paste that selection is pasted, followed by an attribution, as the screenshots show.
I paste into an editor. The attribution is automatically attached.
I imagine disabling Javascript removes that functionality, so it’s not a guaranteed way to always add attributions.
Handy though: as someone who frequently quotes chunks of text from a web page, I generally use my Mars Edit bookmarklet to automatically capture the attribution.
I’d be interested to hear from those more knowledgeable than me what the implications are, if any, of using this script.
I’m trying it out on this site for a while. Give it a go. What do you think?
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Nice. You’re right, it doesn’t work when javascript is off. Can’t think of a downside off the top of my head, though I’d prefer it as a bookmarklet in the browser, rather than the page.
Thanks Mark.
A downside I’ve thought of since writing is that a visitor may be surprised by the added text (as my colleague was) and now suspect my site of harbouring malware.
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