A few weeks ago, I installed the Twitter Tools plugin. Overall, I like it. It allows me to connect my Twitter posts with my blog posts and vice versa. However, I’ve noticed that my "This Week In Tweets" blog posts (which automatically post my previous week’s tweets) are getting too large. Should I stop those entirely or should I narrow down how many appear per post? Your suggestions would be appreciated.
I began to see "Don’t Click" posts appearing in my Twhirl client from a few different users. Then came the warnings not to click the links in those tweets as that would tweet a "Don’t Click" from my own account. Being curious (and careful), I decided to figure out how this could work. First, I would like to recommend that you don’t follow my steps unless you know what you’re doing. This instance is relatively benign (annoying, but benign) the next instance could result in virus/trojan infestation.
After finding one of the "Don’t Click" links, I disabled JavaScript within Firefox. I was reasonably confident that this would prevent anything from running automatically. Next, I opened the link. Sure enough, a page opened up with a "Click Here" button. Next, I examined the source code but didn’t see anything that would automatically post the tweet. It did notice an iFrame loading Twitter.com with a premade Tweet just as thinkgeek mentioned. I didn’t see how it would post the message to your tweet-stream, however.
At the bottom of the page was a credit for the source of the code so (keeping JavaScript disabled), I decided to follow the link. That turned out to be a blog post written in French. A quick trip to Babelfish later, and I was able to read the blog post. The translation wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. So here’s how it goes:
It is quite clever, but it still requires two user actions. First, you need to click on the "Don’t Click" link. Next, you need to click on the "Click Here" button. This whole hack wouldn’t work if Twitter.com didn’t support pre-filling out messages, but those pre-filled out messages can come in handy from time to time. So what can Twitter do to prevent this? To be honest, I don’t know. They’ve said that they’re working on it, but (short of removing the "pre-filled message" functionality), this prank uses standard HTML/CSS conventions. For now, though, the easiest way to prevent this is not to click on those links or, if you do, don’t click on the second link.
Update: I actually did just think of something Twitter could do to stop this. The Don’t Click pranksters can’t see what’s going on when they attempt to get their tweet sent under their victim’s name. Twitter, however, can detect that a pre-filled out message is about to be sent and can pop-up a JavaScript prompt confirming the submission. The pranksters won’t be able to click on the "Ok, submit this" button in a JavaScript prompt and the potential victim will (hopefully) cancel the message and leave.
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Last week at this time, I was getting on board an airplane and heading down to see my parents and grandmother. My grandmother, who turned 94 years old in October, isn’t doing that well. Her memory has been going for some time, but lately she’s had other issues as well. Conflicting reports from my parents either had her as heading downhill or at death’s door. B and I decided that I should head down there to say goodbye as it might be the last time I get to see her. The boys didn’t come because: 1) I didn’t want them to see great-grandma like that and 2) We didn’t want to pull NHL from school. B stayed home with the boys, so I was on my own.
After seeing her in person, I don’t think she’s quite at death’s door, but she does seem to be giving up. All she wants to do is sit and sleep. I roped her into one game of backgammon but her only real contribution was rolling the dice. About the only time that my "real grandmother" emerged was when I showed her some videos of the boys that I brought with me. She smiled and laughed. My father and I spoke about getting webcams set up so the boys could talk with Bubbe and Grandpa, but perhaps it would be theraputic if they were able to talk with Great-Grandma as well. Something to think about.
While visiting, I got the chance to see a series of old photos of my grandmother’s. My mother was trying to decide who to disburse them to when grandma passes away and I decided that they should first be scanned. The scanned versions could be distributed to all of the kids/grandkids via CD or DVD (depending on how many photos there are). This way, everyone gets all of the photos even though not everyone gets all of the prints. My mother and I quickly went through the photos and organized them based on importance. Photos of my grandparents and father/uncle while they were young got the highest importance. Photos of me, my sister, or my cousins while they were young were the lowest.
When I went home, I took the 6 highest priority photos with me and scanned them in. Here they are, along with a photo of my grandmother at her 94th birthday party and a photo of her from this past weekend.
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