tk here

You are at tk here: Some fun with Who's Amung Us

If you are somewhat observant and have been reading this blog, you would have noticed that I've just added a widget from Who's Amung Us.

A slightly interesting quirk that I found was that the widget was not really dependent on anything other than http referrers. This actually makes it quite unreliable since referrers can

1. be turned off easily esp. in Opera, F12 -> Enable referrer logging. This would reduce the number of visitors to your site, but who's counting? :)
   
2. be modified/faked/manipulated with little effort. Essentially this would inflate your website stats, but who's checking? :)
   

Another point to note is that you do not have to use the widget link generated by Who's Amung Us website. In fact you can make up your own! And how is this useful? It has absolutely no use at all except to make your widget link easier to remember. Before you start, there are some important things you need to know:

1. The part you can customise is where the x's are: http://whos.amung.us/show/xxxxxxxx.
2. Doing this may cause your widget to be shared by others, since fixing your widget link to something memorable increases the chances that it will match someone else's choice. This may not have a negative effect, since referrers are taken into account.
3. The part which you can customise, i.e. the very last part of the url, has to be at least eight characters long. It can be longer than 8 characters but only the first 8 are taken into account. As far as I can tell, you can only insert alphanumeric characters into the url. For example, mine is http://whos.amung.us/show/tkhereblog. However, this is equivalent to http://whos.amung.us/show/tkherebl.
4. Remember to change the image url AND the anchor link for the image. Example: My image url is http://whos.amung.us/widget/tkhereblog. My anchor link for the image is http://whos.amung.us/show/tkhereblog.

I think that's all you need to know about customizing the Who's Amung Us widget link. Have fun!