How Tynt Insight works

If you are looking for tips on a range of useful topics, head to Dummies.com (never mind the name). It is the website for the For Dummies series of plain English reference books. The site features interesting topics from it's books on varied & complex subjects.

If you copy & paste any content from there, it will add a link of the URL from where it was copied, at the end of the pasted content. This is achieved by a 12KB JavaScript utility library called Tynt Insight.

There is a nice explanation on StackOverflow about how Tynt Insight works -
  • the code activates on events like mouseup, mousedown, and copy (in the startListeningForTraces function)
  • if the user selected a range of text, then it:
    • creates the HTML for an attribution link, plus optional CC license URL
    • appends this HTML to the selection, placing it inside a zero-size <div> (to keep it invisible on-screen)
    • reports what was copied back to Tynt's servers

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