Tracer by Tynt

After read­ing Zachary Seward’s arti­cle at the Nieman Journalism Lab about the new ser­vice Tracer, I decided to give it a try. Tracer is a javascript that tracks when peo­ple select or copy text from your site. When they copy the text, the script inserts a lit­tle “read more” link at the end of what they copy, along with a link back to the orig­i­nal (and a CC license note, if you choose).

I’m not say­ing that I’ll def­i­nitely keep the script on this site. But it will be inter­est­ing to track what sorts of things peo­ple are high­light­ing and copy­ing from the site.

I’m a lit­tle wor­ried about how it will work with some read­ers’ text edi­tors. I’ve run into some trou­ble with it this morn­ing already, but I think those prob­lems were related to the typog­ra­phy and hyphen­ation plu­g­ins installed on the site. I unin­stalled them and things seem to be work­ing bet­ter now — though past­ing into Apple’s Pages is a lit­tle dicey.

Also, a handy plu­gin I have in Firefox that allows me to “copy as plain text” negates the Tracer script and just copies the text with­out insert­ing any link. Little quirks. We’ll see how it goes.

Related posts:

1. Testing a New Plug-in
2. Dan Gilmore’s ideas for run­ning a news organization