Abe versus Twitter

Yesterday and today I cleared out my inbox and got caught up with our Picasa photos.  I had decided to start the new Gregorian year caught up in that way.

Part of that clean-up was finishing yesterday's post about Louie's week-long visit.  My inbox had a few messages from old friends asking "How is life?" for which I had been procrastinating a reply.  Finishing turning Smiley's kindergarten assignment into a photo-filled humorous view of our week finally gave me an appropriate reply to those e-mails.

That post was worth mentioning on Twitter and Facebook for friends to see.  Back in 2009 I wrote about using social media without ever seeing those websites.  Hooray for HootBar.

I also do not like having my browsing tracked, just on principle.  So I use the Google advertising cookie opt-out plugin and NoScript.

Yesterday I wanted to put my most recent tweet back on my links page, to remind me to do more announcements of blog posts with HootBar.  But I did not want to tell NoScript to allow Twitter, since that allows Twitter to track my browsing on any website with a Twitter button.  (Facebook is similarly nosy.)

The solution was a NoScript setting called ABE.

Here is the ABE code that sems to work.

# Allow Twitter widget on my website (links page) but not Twitter tracking
Site .twitter.com .twimg.com
Accept INCLUSION POST from .davidvs.net
Anonymize

Ta da!  Now I can put the desired Twitter widget on my links page, but not allow Twitter to otherwise see me.

UPDATE: HootBar seems to have problems with tweets that include quotation marks.  For those I must disable ABE to allow myself to log in to Twitter and use the website to post the new tweet.