What Social Networking Sites do you use?
Just stumbled upon some javascript code for determining what social networking sites you visit.
What are you to do if you want readers to promote your content? ... You have to decide on which bookmarking site, if any, to dedicate your precious screen real-estate. It’s a hard choice. If you choose poorly your reader won’t vote—it’s not a single click coupled and out-of-sight means out-of-mind—and your content losses its chance to make it big. You have to choose your horse wisely.
If you could detect which social bookmarking sites your reader uses, on a per-reader basis, you could display only the badges they care about. But you can’t know that because the browser secures the user’s history, right? Wrong.
Let’s try it. You have visited: .
So, is this a cool capability, or a creepy violation of your privacy? I think it is the former; since the code all runs client-side and can be disabled using a tool such as NoScript, and it benefits the user with a cleaner interface. Provide your comments below!
May 29th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Sorry to those who visit our site using IE who couldn’t get through since I posted this last night.
The way this code works is an interesting hack. It creates a hidden iframe with links to all the social networking sites it knows about. Then, it forces the iframe to display visited sites in a different color regardless of what the stylesheet says to do. Then, parses the iframe to find the links marked as ‘visited’.
Anyway, due to the way IE parses and executes scripts and iframes, and the way that my blogging software (Textpattern) puts the scripts within the body element, it was causing IE to crash. Nice, eh? I’ve kludged it by putting in a 1/2 second delay before it tries to execute the script, which seems to alleviate the problem.