New York Times redirects

May 14, 2001 11:03 AM

Suggestion: make nytimes.com links magical things that point to channel.nytimes.com links.
posted by hijinx to Feature Requests at 11:03 AM (12 comments total)

As always, there are quite a few posts on MeFi pointing to the nytimes site. And, if you're on a computer that doesn't contain your registration cookie or you simply don't want to register, you have to wait for someone to pop up a channel.nytimes.com link.

So I was thinking about it, and wondering if it'd be a good idea to have MeFi do some of the work. I don't expect the URL field to get fully parsed and stripped down to the channel.nytimes.com equivalent (although that'd be nice, it'd probably be overkill for this feature). Maybe if the string "www.nytimes.com" is included in the URL, upon preview MeFi can suggest linking to the channel.nytimes.com version instead? A link to a thread or post talking about the channel.nytimes.com feature would be ultra super handy.

On the "How much would you like to see this?" scale, I'm certain this is low, but I thought it'd be a nice touch.
posted by hijinx at 11:04 AM on May 14, 2001

I can do this in about 3 seconds, but I was wondering how long the channel backdoor would stay open. I suppose when it closes, I could just take the rewriting code out.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:08 AM on May 14, 2001

Well, they closed it once before, but it seemed to be a problem with their affiliate sites, so they reopened it. After a brief experiment with a couple other subdomains it's back to channel.

True enough, they could change it at anytime.
posted by dhartung at 11:14 AM on May 14, 2001

Ok, it was three minutes work, and is done. The front page and all comment pages of metafilter rewrite any occurrance of "www.nytimes" and replaces it with "channel.nytimes"

I guess I could do the same with www.cnn -> robots.cnn

should I?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:28 AM on May 14, 2001

Rock, Matt! Thanks!

robots.cnn isn't an awful idea, but I'll point out a caveat in the realm of robots.cnnfn: the latter doesn't display any real-time info whatsoever. That is, if you're looking for stock information, you can't get it at robots.cnnfn.

But, I don't know how much stock talk is going on here anyway.
posted by hijinx at 11:41 AM on May 14, 2001

I dunno. Maybe this isn't such a great idea. Certain parts of the nytimes site, like On This Day, do not require a cookie, and changing the URL to channel.nytimes breaks the link.
posted by Aaaugh! at 2:54 PM on May 14, 2001

Yeah, I don't see why this is something Matt had to do. Every time I click a NY times link, I'm taken to the 'please register page'. Then I just replace 'www' with 'channel' myself. No big whoop.
posted by toddshot at 4:34 PM on May 14, 2001

Why not replace it with a MetaFilter login? You know, with the login/password embedded in the URL?
posted by rodii at 4:38 PM on May 14, 2001

No big whoop.

Well, if you're brand new and are inconvenienced by the constant nytimes logins, and don't know about the channel technique, and have to wait for someone to post about it, that delays a person from getting to the original link to start with. As I said, I thought it'd be a nice touch.

Rodii's idea is equally valid, if not superior.
posted by hijinx at 4:43 PM on May 14, 2001

Doesn't NYTimes crack down on group logins, though?
posted by darukaru at 5:41 PM on May 14, 2001

What, you don't think they'd notice a mere 7000 simultaneous logins, do you?
OK, so maybe it's not such a great idea.
posted by rodii at 6:45 PM on May 14, 2001

matt: on the robots.cnn thing, I would say no. Why? Because even though they're a part of evil, vile AOL/TW we are using their service and the bandwith of their service and I think a fair exchange for getting whatever information they display is to allow them to show a banner ad.

(I just defended AOL. Must wash mouth out with soap. :)
posted by owillis at 7:51 PM on May 16, 2001