Christian Heilmann

Posts Tagged ‘tracking’

Removing UTM data from URLs automatically for cleaner bookmarks

Monday, August 9th, 2010

One of my real annoyances right now is that when you open a link from Google reader and some other systems you get the link followed by tracking data. Take for example the following tweet from Sam:

tweet

If you click the bit.ly link it expands to this abomination:

http://google-chrome-browser.com/test-your-browsers-html5-prowess-html5-test?
utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter
&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Google-Chrome-Browser+%28Google+Chrome%29&utm_content=Twitter

I’ve come across lots of delicious bookmarks that still have all that campaign monitoring stuff in them, which is annoying. To work around that I’ve just written myself a tiny GreaseMonkey script:

Install un-UTM for GreaseMonkey

If the browser now opens a link that has UTM data in it, it removes the information and reloads the page without it to make for a cleaner URL.

Here’s the source of the script for the paranoid:

var loc = window.location.toString();
if(loc.indexOf('utm_source')!==-1){
  window.location = loc.replace(/\?utm_source.*/,'');
}