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.