codependent enabling

[Repost from 072804. Many bloggers still seem unaware of the link generator, so a bit more publicity won't hurt.]

Unlike Mr. Derbyshire, I'm too young to be a curmudgeon (and also am not of British extraction) and hence prefer conservative to reactionary.

But I nonetheless still loathe the Times.

Still, even for bloggers of my ideological persuasion, The Grey Lady is well nigh indispensable. It remains the “paper of record,” even if it now is coasting on decades-old laurels, and on its worst day it at least provides us with lots to complain about. And complain we do—not only about incompetence and bias, but also the fact that any article more than a week old gets locked behind a paid archive.

Except that now there is a workaround for the latter: not new, exactly, but yesterday was the first I'd heard of it (thanks to the Hoosier Review).

Behold the New York Times Link Generator: enter the url for a story, and out pops a future-proofed version. (Like this one for instance, which takes you to a quite interesting piece from February.) There's also a javascript bookmarklet that allows you to create such links on the fly.

There are some limitations, primarily that it will not work for stories older than June 2003. And for those who care, the famously unpredictable Dave Winer claims the lion's share of the credit. Nonetheless, it appears that the Times has done the weblogging community a great service by allowing free use of its archives. Two cheers for the Grey Lady.

And likely you've just witnessed the first and last time that sentiment will appear here.