Avram's journal

While up in Gloucester I had access to a computer, but I’d left all my bookmarks at home. This wasn’t much trouble till I wanted my webcomics fix. At home I’ve got a Comics folder in my Bookmarks bar, with sub-folders for the days of the week, and I just select “Open in Tabs” to get all that day’s comics to open up. On the road, I need to rely on my fallible memory.

Well, that sort of thing is just what del.icio.us was created to help with. I’d been using my del.icio.us account mostly as a memo pad, a place to hold links I didn’t have time to follow up on right away, or things I knew I was going to want to be able to find later, while my own browser’s bookmarks file is for things I know I’m going to want to use frequently, so I hadn’t bothered trying to dump my bookmarks into del.icio.us. But that tags functionality comes in pretty handy for this sort of thing.

I’ve just dumped all of my webcomics links into del.icio.us, giving each one the tag webcomics, as well as a day tag (either one or more days of the week, or daily for comics that update Mon-Fri with optional weekends). Now I can look ’em up just by sticking the appropriate tags in a URL:

http://del.icio.us/avram/webcomics+sunday
http://del.icio.us/avram/webcomics+monday
http://del.icio.us/avram/webcomics+tuesday
http://del.icio.us/avram/webcomics+wednesday
http://del.icio.us/avram/webcomics+thursday
http://del.icio.us/avram/webcomics+friday
http://del.icio.us/avram/webcomics+daily

This doesn’t count the comics I read on my Friends page through LJ RSS feeds.

Ever followed a link to a news story only to plow into an annoying registration wall? Back in the old days (like, five or six years ago) there was the cypherpunks hack — try “cypherpunks” for both the user ID and the password; if that wasn’t already registered, then register with those values. There were complications — if the site didn’t allow a password that was the same as the user ID, “writecode” was the traditional alternative password. Then some sites caught on and started blocking that ID, so people started using “cpunks”, and with four possible combinations to try, it got unwieldy.

Next step: a common clearing house of ID/password combos — BugMeNot! Pretty handy, especially if you install the Firefox extension, or the MSIE extension, or use the JavaScript bookmarklet. [Note: I’ve modified that copy of the bookmarklet, adding “www.” to the bugmenot.com domain name; it wouldn’t work without it. Must be a side-effect of the host move.]

Not that it’s a perfect solution. Various news sites have been spidering BugMeNot’s content, and then dropping those IDs from their registration databases. Sometimes it takes two or three tries to get a password that works. But still, a decent solution.

(And no, they aren’t sharing credit card info or anything like that. BugMeNot has a firm policy of only storing passwords for free sites. Any pay site can send them email asking to be removed/blocked from their database.)

Then, tragedy! BugMeNot was gone! For several days news sites like LAtimes.com had to go without my eyeballs. Turns out someone had pressured BugMeNot’s web host to shut the site down.

But now they’re back, hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech.net. And there’s a discussion going in that Mozilla forum on how to improve the service — decentralize it, publish in XML format, etc.