larryni.me.uk

You might have seen my earlier post on how to disable the DiggBar. I just came across a post that explains how the DiggBar works. It really does not play nice. I didn’t realise that all the link credit actually goes to digg.com and not to the site that provides the content!

The fun stops there. Like lin.cr, it does a 200 code. That means the page is actually on Digg itself — they’re making a page with the DiggBar and pulling in your content without permission into a frame. That’s not illegal, but it’s a tactic that died off years ago. It also means that if you use the Digg short URLs, none of the link credit passes to your page. It’s all kept with Digg.

That sucks.

The above quote is from Search Engine Land’s post about link shortening services. They also provide a way to get out of all frames, not just Digg’s. All you need to do is put the following bit of Javascript between the head tags of your pages:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
if (top.location!= self.location) {
top.location = self.location.href
}
//-->
</script>

The bar still loads, but then just disappears shortly after.

The new DiggBar really annoys the tits off me – I cannot see which link I’m going to when I’m on Digg’s front page and before I bookmark something I have to remember to close the damn thing or I end up with the short Digg URL bookmarked. Even worse, some morons start submitting the short URLs to other sites like Stumbleupon and I even came across submissions on Reddit. WTF! It’s not like your browser can’t handle long URLs. And if i want to submit a page to another social site then I’ll use a bookmarklet or one of the many submit/share buttons found on most pages.

You can disable it in your Digg profile settings:

• click the My Profile link at the top of Digg’s front page
• click the Settings tab
• click viewing preferences under Options on the right and select Never show DiggBar for external links under Site-wide Preferences
• save the changes.

To automatically get rid of the bar on pages that you come across out in the wild you can use a Greasemonkey script like DiggBar Killer or Anti Diggbar.

Update: check out my follow-up post if you run your own website.