Tweet This seems a much more civilized way to allow users to Tweet and Facebook your WordPress postings than Share This which includes a lot of tracking functionality.
Again, while I can’t claim to be the highly trained codemonkey, I have learned from my very quickly fixed (less than an hour!) faux pas with Share This and have now added Tweet This to this site.
After reviewing the code, Tweet This seems to do send nothing to or via any third-party sites and, unless configured to use a third-party URL shortener, includes no traffic logging click-thru tracking or similar functionality. It doesn’t appear to load any external .js either.
So, unless somebody educates me to the contrary, I’m going to call this ‘safe’ and leave it deployed. I hope you find it useful.
– Jon
Update: Disabled.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious. The JavaScript calls for files off this server that I need time to look into and, honestly, I deeply, deeply, deeply hate that kind of work.
As of now, I can’t feel confident the Plugin isn’t bugging the page and logging each ‘click to post’. I don’t think it ever skimmed any user info other than what normally hits a traffic log but even still.
This is kind of a bummer really because it looks like I’ll need to figure out how to roll my own here and that’s way more work and way too at the margins of my skill-set to be a good use of my time right now.
Being a hard-case about practicing what I preach isn’t fun.
—————–
I added the Share This plug-in to this site because I wanted to make it easier for me and for readers to share posts from here on Twitter and Facebook. Â What I don’t want to do is be part of the problem.
To that end, I have tried to configure Share This not to send any information anywhere but to where YOU intend to send it when you use the sharing buttons.
So:
- Email button, which bounced through another server? Disabled.
- Share This Button which bounced through another server? Disabled.
- Analytics service not activated .
I am not 100% Â confident in my skills in evaluating this code so, please, if you know of anything that the Share This WordPress Plugin does or installs that I might have missed or that could be troubling, let me know. Â NOBODY should think they can know it all and I, not being a PHP-god by the longest shot, certainly don’t.
– Jon
A while ago I let rip with this bit of pith:
“I think we’d all be much better off if we started thinking of our personal info as currency and our opinions as monetizable content.†– Jon Alper
Today, I learned of any even pithier quote via: Petteri Hiisilä
“If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you are the product being sold.” – MetaFilter User: blue_beetle
