Slightly off-topic, but I tend to highlight text as I read it, and I find it very annoying how they seem to automatically save the text snippet that you highlight whenever you highlight it. The progress bar constantly updates and it's quite distracting.
Good to know that I'm not the only one. And not only do I highlight the text, but I just keep clicking, highlighting and un-highlighting. So I'm probably really overloading their servers with the AJAX callbacks.
Out of curiosity, do you (and this question is open to other compulsive selectors) tend to play with things physically when you read as well? Eg. subconsciously pick up a nearby object and start playing with it.
(I do both, and I suspect they tend to go together)
Yeah I'm the same way. I'm a compulsive highlighter and I often find myself disassembling pens or mechanical pencils, or folding paper, or removing the plastic coating inside a bottlecap, or balancing my glasses on the tip of my finger...The people I spend time with in meetings must wonder if I'm actually paying attention.
Not while reading, but I'm notoriously bad when I'm on the phone...small objects all over my house and office are in a constant state of displacement because I pick them up and set them down somewhere else while on the phone.
I highlight to track my position, so it's easier to keep reading after I scroll.
Hmmm, scrolling is not ideal for reading (e.g the Kindle pages, I think). Problem = opportunity, so maybe one solution is a plugin that automatically adds pagination (not actual pages, just mark them with horizontal bars - I think easy enough to do in greasemonkey).
Every time you select something they post back to their server with details about the selection (including the article, location of your selection, referrer, etc)
That's already the case for AJAX requests in most browsers. The problem is that Tynt doesn't use AJAX for the communication (they can't, because they communicate with a domain other than the one serving the content). I'm guessing they use a hidden iframe instead.
Under Linux with Firefox and NoScript enabled. Right-click "Copy" does add the link. But just a "highlight" and "middle-button-paste" doesn't add the link.
NoScript warns me of an XSS attempt when I highlight the text though.
You also have to copy through the browser's clipboard interface, not the X11 selection. Presumably Javascript is capable of hooking the former, but not the latter.
Still doesn't work, even with using the Edit menu. I setup AdBlock to stop the NYT doing similar (as others have mentioned), and possibly it's blocking this one too.
I feel so isolated from the everyman. The web I see is not the web he sees.
I'm using Seamonkey on Linux, with javascript on, and the page fully loaded. I've tried ctrl-c, right click/copy, and edit/copy from the toolbar. In all cases it copies normally with no link inserted.
Haven't bothered looking through the JS source, but it seems to be something bound to C-c. It only works for me on Linux when I use the main clipboard; highlight-and-middle-click doesn't do it.
That's an argument against the "helpful" little box that pops up when you select on NYTimes ... but that's not what this is about. This is silent (until you copy/paste anyway).
I can't speak for other browsers, but in Firefox there are some brief but distracting UI changes when you select text. It is a side-effect of the click tracking code they use.
