Weblog-friendly NYT Links

December 19, 2007 2:30 PM

Tiny pony: would it be possible to convert links to New York Times pages to the 'weblog-friendly' equivalent on posting?

Tons of posts link to the NYT, and almost always someone will complain about having to register to see the page, or use BugMeNot, when neither is necessary.

As far as I can see, it's a matter of adding &partner=rssuserland to the URL (though I have no idea if that's a hard thing for the site to do magically whenever it spots an NYT link in the posting form, in the style of the NYT Link Generator thingy).

posted by jack_mo to Feature Requests at 2:30 PM (15 comments total)

It was a much bigger deal when those links would die in two weeks, now not so much. (at least so sayeth this registered NYT user)
posted by caddis at 2:33 PM on December 19, 2007

You could even do &partner=metafilter. It takes any input you give it.
posted by Pants! at 3:08 PM on December 19, 2007

Since it's no longer necessary to weblogify NYT links to keep them around, there's not much reason to do this. If people still complain about registering at the NYT, well then, they doth protest too much and should just get over it and sign up.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:43 PM on December 19, 2007 [1 favorite]

Well, methinks that having been, twice today, summoned to "sign up" to NYT in posted links that some might think twice about the links that they are indeed posting.

Good Articles I've missed,
Some, might well be pissed,
But I, for one,
Don't giveth
A Shit!
posted by snsranch at 8:14 PM on December 19, 2007

People just need to get an account. It's the NYT, for crying out loud. You should be reading it anyway.
posted by "Tex" Connor and the Wily Roundup Boys at 8:30 PM on December 19, 2007

"Tex", I'm gonna have to call horseshit on that one. The idea is that when ya click on a link, tha link shouldn't be a "sign up" link.

RE: NYT, I need it like I need the UK's Daily Mail.
posted by snsranch at 8:44 PM on December 19, 2007

This feature would make my day on a regular basis.
posted by stet at 9:04 PM on December 19, 2007

Really? You regularly click on links to NYT articles, but don't think it's worth signing up to?
posted by jacalata at 9:08 PM on December 19, 2007

I've had an account on there since like 99 or something. I even grabbed a free select account with my old .edu email.

They do have good articles every once in a while, it's worth signing up for. I realize it's annoying, it takes like 5 minutes and you'll never have to worry about it for the rest of your life.
posted by delmoi at 9:31 PM on December 19, 2007

There MUST be a greasemonkey script that auto-converts all NYT links, right?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:04 PM on December 19, 2007

RE: NYT, I need it like I need the UK's Daily Mail.

What a ridiculous thing to say. If you thought that saying something monumentally stupid would bolster the credibility of your opinion on linking to sites requiring a login, you miscalculated.
posted by "Tex" Connor and the Wily Roundup Boys at 10:06 PM on December 19, 2007

There MUST be a greasemonkey script that auto-converts all NYT links, right?

Indeed there is. There are a half-dozen that rewrite links to the single-page version too, if that's your thing.
posted by Partial Law at 11:28 PM on December 19, 2007

Cool, I'll just install the Greasemonkey script then.
posted by jack_mo at 3:18 AM on December 20, 2007

stupid IE.

There doesn't happen to be a greasemonkey for Internet Explorer does there?

I'm always a little annoyed when I find the solution to deal with metafilter quirks is to use some external script to fix them, instead of them being dealt with locally. In this case, it seems like it's obviously poor taste to post a link that requires sign up when links that don't are available. It also seems like it'd be the same sort of effort to fix these onsite as it is to have the youtube special link markers.

And it also seems to me that anything that all right thinking people read daily as implied above is not the sort of thing that would even need to be posted to MetaFilter.
posted by garlic at 7:40 AM on December 20, 2007

I signed up for an nytimes account in 2000, probably with fake info (I really don't remember). Just think of the seven productive years I could have spent bitching about having to sign up instead of wasting my time reading articles!
posted by zsazsa at 9:00 AM on December 20, 2007