Properly Linking to New York Times Articles

[vakkotaur]

Sometimes one runs across a link to a New York Times article and upon clicking the link winds up not at the article but at the wretched registration page. While a person could fill in the registration page, yet again, it's a tiresome bother. Most times some newspaper site wants registration I simply give up and figure anything important will show up somewhere else with less hassle.

There is a way around this, and it isn't bugmenot.com which seems not to work very often. There is the New York Times Link Generator. If you have registered and are looking at an article you'd like to link to, feed the URL of the article to the link generator and it will produce a link unencumbered by registration hassles. Your readers might actually read the article now.

Or if you encounter a registration demanding link, you can recover. Open the link in a new window and remove all the registration crap in the URL. This is two parts. The real article URL is sandwiched between a registration page URL and an identifier. Cut out the registration URL, everything from the very start of the URL up to the "h" (of http) in the real URL. Then after the trailing .html in the real URL, cut that trash out as well. Copy the remaining real URL and feed it to the link generator. This is a bit of a hassle, but for me it's been much more reliable than trying to register yet again.

The only problem is that the article can't be too new or the link generator won't be able to produce a link. It will at least inform you of that, however. While in an ideal world this gyration would be unnecessary, at least this solution exists. Too bad it doesn't exist for other registration-happy papers.

Comments

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Does javascript have to be off for that last trick to work? Because not everybody leaves it turned off.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I don't know, I keep javascript off almost all the time so the issue never comes up. That, by the way, is how to defeat the Star Tribune's registration - simply disable javascript.

[wordslinger.livejournal.com]

Mah HERO!!!!