Resurgence of Intellitext?

On 18/7/2006 6:13 AM, "sevier" <sevierseviersystems.com> spake thus:

> Of late I've seen periodic activation of 'Intellitext', I would guess on an
> experimental basis, at a couple of sites most notably macnn.com. Intellitext
> double-underlines selected words on a page, and when your mouse passes over
> the word a small window opens (pops up) displaying marketing text and links to
> purchase locations. Does anyone know if this feature can be turned off as I
> would prefer they experiment on someone else.

It's almost certainly CSS based, so you'd have to look at either turning off
CSS completely, or creating your own local style sheet and forcing the
browser to use that. You'd have to look at the page source to find out what
your style sheet would need to override.

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger

On 18/7/2006 9:12 AM, I postulated:

> It's almost certainly CSS based,

Having just run into this myself (at <http://www.boutell.com/gd/>), I take
that back. It's actually primarily JavaScript-based, which would have been
my second guess anyway :) I assume that the ContentLink code looks for
specific words in the web page and highlights them on the fly --- there's
certainly nothing in the web page source to indicate why a particular word
or phrase gets marked. I also noticed that a couple of them disappeared of
their own accord; I wonder if that was intentional or a bug :)

Turning off JavaScript should kill this, but it's a pain to have to turn it
on and off for legitimate stuff. You might want to look into an ad-blocking
proxy, they should be able to deal with this kind of thing, once they know
what to look for.

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger

On 18/7/2006 6:13 AM, "sevier" <sevierseviersystems.com> wrote:

> Of late I've seen periodic activation of 'Intellitext', I would guess on
> an experimental basis, at a couple of sites most notably macnn.com.
> Intellitext double-underlines selected words on a page, and when your
> mouse passes over the word a small window opens (pops up) displaying
> marketing text and links to purchase locations. Does anyone know if this
> feature can be turned off as I would prefer they experiment on someone
> else.

It's Javascript based, and fortunately has its own host. I use FireFox
with the AdBlock extension, and blocking "http://macnn.us.intellitxt.com/"
will kill it for MacNN. (Probably substituting "*" for "macnn" would make
it cover even more sites, but I haven't played with wildcards in AdBlock
much.)

Dave Scocca

--On July 18, 2006 1:49:15 PM -0700 Nigel Stanger
<nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
>
> Turning off JavaScript should kill this, but it's a pain to have to turn
> it on and off for legitimate stuff. You might want to look into an
> ad-blocking proxy, they should be able to deal with this kind of thing,
> once they know what to look for.

Opera allows you to control javascript on a per-site basis. There is also
a firefox extension that allows you to do this too.

Kevin

On 7/18/06 4:49 PM, "Nigel Stanger" <nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz>
wrote:

> Turning off JavaScript should kill this, but it's a pain to have to turn it
> on and off for legitimate stuff. You might want to look into an ad-blocking
> proxy, they should be able to deal with this kind of thing, once they know
> what to look for.

My first thought was the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox. Sure enough,
Greasemonkey script repository, userscripts.org, has a few.

(their tags are apparently case sensitive)
http://userscripts.org/tags/intellitxt
http://userscripts.org/tags/IntelliTXT

When searching, note the official product spelling is "IntelliTXT." Vibrant
Media is the name of the culprit company. There's another company called
Kontera that apparently provides a similar ad service.

>Opera allows you to control javascript on a per-site basis. There is also
>a firefox extension that allows you to do this too.

You could probably also use Greasemonkey in Firefox (or the
Greasemonkey clones for other browsers) to remove it from the page. I
haven't encountered it enough to become annoyed with it yet, but when
I do, I'll turn to Greasemonkey.

Brian